Working parents remember their own day care before sending children.
Ask adults to recall their experiences in day care, and they pause and fumble for some small thing, some token of comfort or confusion. It could be a memory of the communal box of crayons, or the dreaded tomato soup, a picture of Jesus looking down from the wall or the lap of a woman they can no longer name.
In remembering, they touch the child they were then, very young and away from home.
Since the 1960s and ’70s, when women joined the work force in earnest, formal day care has become a fact of life for millions of American children. It has also become a public policy question discussed in the White House and Congress. It’s a subject of major research at the National Institutes of Health.
But questions about day care are intimate ones for this now-grown generation of day-care children.
Are they different adults because they once endured the strangeness of the day-care world, and discovered how to live in it? Yes.
Are they putting their own children in day care?
Yes, said Sara Bigley in New Jersey.
No, said Simon Rakoff in Virginia.
Thirty years ago, at the top of a dreary set of stairs in Detroit, 4-year-old Sara stepped into a new world, the Children’s Learning Center, a bright place, alive with other children.
“The kids were very diverse. I liked it.”
Life there was certainly different from the somewhat lonely days she had been spending with an elderly baby-sitter.
“It was a lot more interesting,” Bigley said.
Now Bigley, a 4th-grade teacher in Cherry Hill, N.J., is the mother of two boys, ages 2 and 5. From the age of 4 months, she has placed each in day care. It is “important to me they be with other kids,” she said. Bigley says she cried a little, preparing her second baby’s things for his first day at day care, “packing away his little bear in a box.”
“I do feel guilty at times. But if I were home, I’d have them go at least three mornings a week because I know it’s so important.”
Organized day care got its start in America well over a century ago as a philosophical movement. It enjoyed a practical boom when mothers went to work during World War II. Today almost a third of all preschoolers go to a day-care center or nursery school.
There has been a shortage of long-range research on the effects of quality day care on children, but a comprehensive study by the National Institutes of Health is helping to provide a better understanding.
The study, started in 1991 and still under way, has offered some reassuring findings: that children in group arrangements seem to show fewer behavioral problems; that children in day care learn to think and talk as well as children cared for by their mothers; that day care by itself needn’t diminish mother-child attachment.
The study has found that positive relations with parents are far more important to children’s development than whether they attend day care.
But even in the best of worlds, the decision to send a child to day care is a tough one.
In Reston, Va., Rakoff, 27, a health-care consultant, recalls the magical years he spent gluing beads to paper and playing “haunted house” at the Reston Children’s Center.
At the time, Rakoff recalls, the center was located in the wing of a spookily wonderful white Victorian house, a place that seemed homey and exciting at the same time.
“I loved the experience,” said Rakoff. “It’s great to be part of something bigger than yourself.”
When Rakoff was a teenager, that old house was torn down. He took a walk through the rubble, and saved himself a shard of the foundation–“my foundation.”
The place formed him, he said. He even met his wife, Jodi, there. “I was 3 1/2. She was 2 1/2.”
In the evening, the Rakoffs play with their 10-month-old daughter, Ellie, in the living room of their home. Jodi Rakoff said she doesn’t remember much about their old day-care center; she describes just a “glimmer” of the swingset.
The center now occupies a modern facility, not far away. But the Rakoffs can’t bear to send their daughter.
Simon Rakoff is convinced day care is more serious than it used to be, that it is more like school, not the dreamy refuge he remembers. Besides, Jodi Rakoff, who used to work as a dental assistant, cannot bear to part with her baby.
“I’d cry every day if I had to put her in day care,” she said.
