Day Care: Short- or Long-Term Solution?

With the rapid increase in maternal employment, out-of-home care for young children is being actively promoted as a social necessity in a changing society. The trend is toward group care, in centers of increasing size serving children from infancy up. However, the needs of young children for sensory experience, flexibility in timing, and a sense of the future are very difficult to meet in institutionalized settings. Day care serves, at present, as a necessary from of welfare, provided to rescue the child and parent victims of the system. In the long run, however, it will be important to develop social policy in support of alternatives that are good for children and families. Several seem to show promise: (1) flexibility in time and place of work, that is, flexible hours, job sharing, part-time work, work-site care, and work at the child-rearing site; (2) redefined “families†as support networks, that is, extended families that include unrelated as well as related members, shared housing, and neighborhood family day care; and (3) choice of child-less life-styles by some adults.