Ideas for finding and choosing the right childcare option

Nine months of pregnancy and days of delivery is the easy part for some working parents. For them, the hard part comes when it's time to decide what to do with the baby when everyone heads back to work.

Assuming a parent, grandparent or other relative isn't available to watch junior, it's time to consider home-based care facilities, daycare centers, nannies and au pairs.

Finding a desired type of care provider that's located along a parent's path to work and with vacancies for a child or children is enough to send some parents back to the adding machine to try and manage the household on one income.

As if that wasn't enough, parents have to like and trust the people providing the care - and be able to pay the increasingly hefty bill.

It's a huge decision, said Dr. Anna Maria Wilms Floet, a behavioral-developmental pediatrician practicing in Baltimore. None of us are ready to give up our own child to someone we must trust.

Floet speaks from professional and practical experience. Both her children were in daycare, the first in a family childcare setting or home-based program, and the other in a daycare center.

Neither was perfect, but you have to balance the positives and negatives, she said.

For instance, after a few months in the home-based center, Floet learned that her first child was actually spending hours in the car each day driving back and forth to another child's school. But in the center setting, her second child had many more illnesses because of being exposed to many more children.

Finding and choosing childcare is an anxiety-ridden time, she said. In the end, you have to have trust in the person or persons caring for your children.

Staying home option

For some who can afford it, that has meant not returning to work.

A sizeable number of physicians, lawyers and other professional women are now deciding to stay home after they have children instead of trying to find outside care, said Sandy Skolnik, executive director of the Maryland Childcare Resource Network, which helps oversee a statewide list of centers and family care facilities

Others become family childcare providers because they want to stay home while their own kids are young. Some parents are finding they can juggle schedules or telecommute to balance childcare and work, Skolnik said.

About 75 percent of the approximately 900,000 children under the age of 12 in Maryland have mothers in the work force and may require childcare, according to Maryland Committee for Children figures.

In the state, there are about 10,500 family childcare providers and about 1,400 center-based programs. There are another 500 full- day infant care centers and about 1,700 programs for school-age children who need before- and after-school care.

Family childcare providers are a popular choice for some parents because children are in a home environment. These facilities can only accept eight children, two of them infants, and they are usually cheaper than centers.

Unfortunately the number of these care providers is declining. Last year 16 percent of the state's licensed family childcare providers left the business, resulting in a net loss of 537 family care providers.

In addition to that decline leading to a drop in the overall number of choices for parents seeking daycare, high turnover rates mean parents who found care once now have to switch kids to other providers.

The number of center-based programs is expected to increase by about 14 percent by 2008 and the number of full-time infant centers and school-aged programs in the state are projected to increase by 40 percent and 23 percent, respectively, by 2008, according to the Maryland Committee for Children.

Search begins

One place many parents begin a search for childcare is with the Maryland Childcare Resource Network, which is funded by the Maryland Committee for Children. The network's Web site had a record 1.8 million hits last year and averages about 200,000 hits per month.

Thirteen regional referral centers help inquiring parents find childcare options near their home. For special circumstances, counselors will call ahead to find out if there's room for a child, Skolnik said.

For instance, one counselor last year made about 200 phone calls to find care options for a set of blind twins who also suffered from heart ailments, Skolnik said.

The centers receive many calls from new parents getting started and from parents looking to switch providers. In some cases, parents call with daycare emergencies.

A few months ago a woman called because the in-home care provider she had been bringing her daughter to for years had unexpectedly died the night before, said Laura Terrell director of the childcare directory for Prince George's Child Resource Center in Largo.

Parents who know they plan to return to work should begin looking for care early in the process - which means as early as three or four months before the baby is born.

Start early so you're used to interviewing care providers and have more time to find one you're comfortable with, Terrell said.