Full text of Day Care Services: Form and Substance: A Report of a Conference, November 17-18, 1960 : Women's Bureau Bulletin, No. 281

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DAY
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SERVICES
form and substance

a report of a conference
November 17-18, I960




children’s bureau
publication number 393—1961

women’s bureau
bulletin number 281—1961

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE
Children’s Bureau
Social Security Administration
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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
Women’s Bureau




1961

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DAY
CARE
SERVICES
form and substance
a report of a conference
November 17-18, I960
compiled by GERTRUDE L. HOFFMAN
Specialist on Homemaker Services and Day Care Services
Division of Social Services, Children’s Bureau

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington 25, D.C. - Price 25 cents




foreword
The National Conference on Day Care for Children, convened
in November 1960, was the first of its kind ever held in the United
States. The conference was sponsored by the Children’s Bureau of
the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the
Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. In the plan­
ning and arrangement of this conference, both agencies joined with
voluntary organizations concerned about the welfare of children and
their families wdio felt that a pooling of knowledge and experience
would be of mutual benefit in the promotion of community action
on day care.
This publication gives a full report of the conference pro­
ceedings including the steps taken in the year long planning by the
two Bureaus and an ad hoc advisory committee, and a brief state­
ment on the evolution of nursery schools and day-care services.
. .
sPirit of the American democratic tradition, those par­
ticipating in the conference expressed their ideas and opinions freely.
As is true in any discussion affecting family welfare, many issues
are controversial. The recommendations given in this report reflect
the consensus of the 12 working groups who prepared them. As
President John F. Kennedy said in a message read at the conference,
‘Conflict can be turned to good advantage if it stimulates not only
increased awareness but also positive action.” Although the indi­
vidual speakers, the representatives attending the conference, and
the Government agencies sponsoring the conference may not agree
wholeheartedly with each other’s opinions and ideas, all the vary­
ing viewpoints and objectives are presented in this report. These
have been edited somewhat in the interests of brevity and clarity.
The Children’s Bureau and the Women’s Bureau acknowledge
with grateful appreciation the efforts of the planning group, the sym­
posium speakers, and the representatives of the many public and
private organizations who contributed so much to the success of the
day-care conference. Grateful acknowledgment is made also to those
who reviewed the draft report and provided comments.
In publishing this report, it is our hope that it will stimulate
those already working in this field, and that it will encourage further
efforts among Federal, State, and local government agencies as well
as among volunteer organizations in the provision of adequate day­
care services for the children who need them.

KATHERINE B. OETTINGER

ESTHER PETERSON

Chief, Children's Bureau
Social Security Administration
U.S. Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare

Director, Women’s Bureau
U.S. Department of Labor




contents
FOREGROUND FOR THE CONFERENCE______

1

FROM THEN TO NOW

3

THE CONFERENCE ITSELF...

5

Symp osium...
Women in the labor force_________________
Changing values in our society____________
Why day care?__________________ ____
Day care—an essential child welfare service...

5
5
8
9
14

The heart of the matter
Essential elements in a good community program..
Group 1: Services to preschool children_____
Group 2: Services to school-age children_____

15
16
16
19

Varieties of services
24
Group 3: Special needs of children_________
Group 4: Special needs of employed parents...
Group 5: Special needs of families__________

24
25
27

Promoting adequate standards________________
Group 6: Licensing and consultation________
Group 7: Personnel and training___________

29
29
33

Promoting community responsibility___________
Group 8: Factfinding
35
Group 9: The community’s stake in good day
care
37
Group 10: Community education, coordina­
tion and interpretation_________________

35

Financing day-care services___________________
Group 11: Ways and means_______________
Group 12: Ways and means_______________

40
40
42

The conference ends

39

44

RECOMMENDATIONS

48

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

51

AD HOC COMMITTEE




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FOREGROUND
FOR THE CONFERENCE
ON NOVEMBER 17-18, 1960, a group of people representing
voluntary and public agencies, citizen and professional organizations,
labor and management, came to Washington at the request of the
Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, and the Children’s
Bureau, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to
consider the urgent and growing nationwide need for day-care services.
For some time prior to this conference, many people in a variety
of places had been searching for ways to imbue communities with
some concept of what a tremendous force for national well-being a
full program of day-care services for children could be. These groups
had held sessions in New York, Washington, Atlantic City, and other
points in the country to spotlight the plight of children who, for some
reason or other, needed care and protection for part of the day by
people other than their own parents.
These groups had been meeting all over the country and, through
working and communicating with each other, found that there was
compelling support for a national meeting. The long-time concern
of the Women’s Bureau and the Children’s Bureau for the day-care
needs of children placed these two agencies at the focus of this interest.
With the encouragement and support from a myriad of sources, the
two Bureaus decided to call together a core group to assay interest in
day care, define objectives and purposes, and decide on means of
achieving them.
In November 1959, an Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on the Day
Care of Children was appointed. Twelve people selected from volun­
teer women’s associations, labor, management, national social agencies,
education, and health agencies began threshing out proposals. A de­
cision was made that a national conference on day care for children
was the best vehicle through wrhich to call the country’s attention
to the potential for positive living that day-care services provide both




1

now and in the future. The National Capital was selected for the
site. The conference grew in size from 100 to 400.
Every query concerning day care was placed before the com­
mittee. Ideas, concepts, understandings, misunderstandings, contro­
versies, definitions, purposes, ad infinitum, were tossed into the
cauldron for assessment. Form and substance for the conference
had to be delineated and cut to fit the realities of time, money, place,
personnel, and energy.
An infinite number of pieces constitute the day-care pie. Each
piece bears significance to the ideal program which might be hoped
for in the future. Delimiting the conference content necessarily
enforced the selection of primary goals and areas within which to
explore. This proved to be a most complicated task and one which
consumed much time for the next few months.
Following the first meeting, the committee was doubled in size
to diversify the interests and to create a more representative group.
Eventually through individual interviews, subcommittee meetings,
and subsequent meetings of the entire committee emerged a common
consent that the most pressing problem, in view of the known and
unknown numbers of children needing care, was to arouse the con­
cern of communities and to provide practical means of action for
advancing day-care services wherever they were needed.
Through the working participation of members of the com­
mittee, the following purposes were born. The conference would seek:
To encourage development of day-care services for children who
needed them.
To examine the extent and variety of day-care needs and resources.
To identify roadblocks in providing day-care services, adequate
in quantity, quality, and distribution.
To promote good standards for safeguarding the children served.
To foster wider understanding of the pressing need for day-care
services.
To stimulate broader community responsibility for day-care
services.
To develop recommendations for citizen and professional action
at local, State, and national levels.
From this statement of purpose stemmed the precise and care­
ful planning of the program, geared not to the minutiae of activities
for children, nor to the exploration of the infinite knowables about
their growth and development, but to the broad, sweeping areas of a
day-care service which could create community sponsorship and
citizen leadership for this important approach to the preservation of
family life.
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FROM
THEN
TO NOW

AS A BACKGROUND for this report, it seems appropriate
to scan, in at least a panoramic way, the highlights of day-care serv­
ices for children and their families.
While a full historical picture on day-care services cannot be
presented here, the peaks of its development in the United States and
their relationship to the current scene are important for this conference.
The first day nursery in the United States opened its doors in
1854 in New York City. It resulted from a woman’s concern for
those children left alone during the day while their mothers eked out
an existence in domestic service or in the factories of the community.
Her solicitude reflected an inherent belief as to the importance of
family life for the child—a forerunner of our present concept that
a child’s own home should be preserved for him when and if it is at all
possible, and that enfeebled financial resources should never be the
sole cause of denying a child his own family.
This first day-care effort emphasized the need of charity for
mothers who worked, and the care it offered was purely custodial con­
sidered in the light of modern knowledge. However, without question,
the experience gained through the years in early day nurseries such
as this produced a firm foundation for our ever expanding understand­
ing of children’s needs and ways of meeting them.
Following 1854, day nurseries came into being all over the
country each one a philanthropic effort on the part of a community.
With the changing social and economic scene, day-nursery
personnel, like their counterparts in other forms of social service,
came to the conclusion that they needed to join forces to exchange
ideas, formulate plans for expansion of service, and gather momentum
on a larger front. As a consequence, the National Federation of
Day Nurseries was founded in Chicago in 1898. It represented the
first cooperative effort to instill in the minds and hearts of communities
that day care must be part of the fabric of community service, that this
599015 0 -62 -2




3

service had something unique to offer, and that standards were nec­
essary if children were to be safeguarded.
Despite these solid beginnings, the expansion of day-care pro­
grams has been sporadic. Day care received impetus from the trage­
dies of the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, and World
War II. After each of these events, enthusiasm leveled off. But, for­
tunately, each time the valley of depleted interest was less deep
and a plodding sort of uphill progress occurred.
Prior to World War II, the depression of the thirties probably
saw the greatest growth in nursery schools and day-care centers.
But the primary purpose of these centers was to provide employment
of women in public works programs rather than to meet the develop­
mental requirements of children.
During World War II, the requirements of children were of
concern and new knowledge was applied in the day nurseries, day-care
centers, and family day-care homes. However, the primary emphasis
was on the need of the Nation to utilize women in the defense efforts
and on the necessity of the mother to have day-care services to pro­
vide care for her children while she worked.
Since World War II, ever-increasing concern for children
and development of sound programs of day care to meet their needs are
slowly replacing the former emphasis. The shift is not yet complete
but this point of view is slowly seeping into the planning and
promotion of day-care services.
It is to be hoped that the effect will be to increase immeasur­
ably the dimension of service to children.

4




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THE
CONFERENCE
ITSELF
THE CONFERENCE was designed to open with a symposium
to lay before the participants a background of information and opin­
ion about the problem, the hurdles, the changing scene of current
living, together with some ideas for resolution of the inadequate qual­
ity and quantity of day-care service now available.
From this background would come fruitful discussion on a
variety of issues at stake. The discussion logically then could move
to formulating recommendations upon which the Nation could act.

Symposium
Not all the facts nor all the problems could come before the
conference, but a sifting of these by the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee
occurred, and a selection of the most pertinent was made for this
symposium.

Women in the luhoT fovce (Dr. Ewan Clague, Commissioner of
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor)

Because working mothers are the greatest consumers of day­
care services, a look at their relative importance in the labor force
seemed imperative.
Dr. Clague created a vivid picture of one facet of our era with




5

his concise presentation of the economic factors affecting day care for
children.
One of the outstanding trends in the labor force in the last half
century has been the marked increase in the number of women workers.
Women, of course, have always worked; in fact, in many societies they
do most of the work.
In defining the labor force, however, economists insist that work
be defined as that kind of activity which is paid for. Thus, to be included
in the labor force statistics, a person must have paid employment or be
actively seeking a job with pay. The difficulty here is that many women
work in their homes for love of their families rather than for pay, and
this kind of work cannot be measured in economic tabulations. Even
so, and within the existing definition, the longrun trend of women’s par­
ticipation in the labor force is unmistakable.
In 1900, only 18 percent of the Nation’s labor force were women.
By 1920, the proportion had increased to 20 percent, and by 1940 to 25
percent. By I960, the ratio had risen to fully one-third. When measured
in absolute numbers there were about 5 million women in the labor
force in 1900, and by I960 this had increased over AVi times. This trend
has been due to a number of factors. An outstanding one has been
the marked decline in agricultural employment and the rise of indus­
trial and commercial jobs. Of special importance has been the great in­
crease in white-collar activities of all kinds.
In 1919, immediately after World War I, about two-thirds of the
labor force in this country was engaged in the production industries—
agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction. Today, women
constitute about one-fourth of manufacturing employment, but only a
small fraction of the other three. Only about one-third of the 1919 labor
force was engaged in the remaining sources of employment—wholesale
and retail trade; transportation and communication; insurance and real
estate; Federal, State, and local governments; and service industries such
as hotels, laundries, beauty parlors, and the like. These are the industry
groups in which women are frequently employed and in some, women
are the dominant job holders.
Over the years since 1919, there has been a complete turnabout,
with about 5 million more workers employed in the service industries
during 1959 than in the goods producing industries.
The growth of the service industries has provided women with
many job opportunities; and, in turn, the availability of increasing
numbers of women workers has made possible the rapid expansion of
such industries.
Our particular concern for this conference is not with women
workers in general, but with those who are rearing young children. The
working life pattern of women is, first, that quite a high proportion of
them undertake work outside the home in the late teens and early
twenties, before marriage. After marriage, a considerable fraction turn
to the rearing of children. Later, at about age 40, after the children
are old enough to take care of themselves, women tend to reenter the
labor force in large numbers. There are, however, many married women
6




who work outside the home even though they have young children
to care for.
In March 1959, there were 17.2 million women in the labor
force who had ever been married—almost exactly one-third of the 51.7
million such women in the population. Approximately 8 million (almost
half) of these women had children under 18 years of age—about 5 mil­
lion, children 6 to 17 years only; 3 million, children under 6 years.
The numbers of married women in the labor force have been
increasing markedly since World War II. Let us take the labor force
status of married women with husband present, which means leaving
out for the moment the widowed, divorced, and separated women with
children. Married women (husband present) with children 6 to 17 years
old increased from about 2 million in the spring of 1948 to 4 million
in the spring of 1959. Those women with children under 6 years
(whether or not there were older children as well) also doubled in
numbers over the decade—from 114 to 2Vi million. It is clear that a
larger and larger proportion of married women with children are going
outside the home to work.
These are the trends from the past. What is the outlook for the
future? According to projections issued by the Department of Labor
in I960, the labor force will grow by more than 13 million during the
decade from I960 to 1970, approximately an 18 percent increase. Almost
half of this large increase will consist of women workers. For example,
in 1970, it seems likely that fully half of all women in the population
between the ages of 35 and 55 will be in the labor force. Excluding
teenage girls and women 65 years of age and over, at least two out
of every five women in 1970 will be in the labor force.
This trend is particularly applicable to the group of women we
are discussing here. Among women whose children are in school or
past school age, the proportion who will be in the labor force in 1970
will be much higher than it is now. Consequently, the problem of the
care of children of working mothers will be even greater than it is today.
This expansion in the number of women workers is being facili­
tated and encouraged by shifts in the supply of and demand for labor.
For one thing, during the coming decade the number of male workers
will increase very little in the age group 25 to 34, and will actually
decline in the age group 35 to 44. This latter group includes persons
born during the Great Depression when the birth rates were low. An­
other shift, noted earlier, is the continuing growth of white-collar occupa­
tions in the service industries. These are the occupations which employ
large proportions of women. The structure of American industry is
changing in the direction of greater opportunities for women workers.
Another factor in this shift is the increasing opportunities for
workers who choose to work part time. It is estimated that there will
be 16 million part-time workers in 1970, a 30 percent increase over
I960. These part-time workers are heavily concentrated in the service
industries. In 1959, about 22 percent of the workers in the service
and finance group of industries usually worked part time, and about 18
percent of the workers in wholesale and retail trade were part-time




7

employees. In addition, it is expected that other industries will re­
schedule more of their jobs to a part-time basis.
The part-time workers consist very largely of young people in
school and of adult women, many of the latter with home responsibili­
ties. So it appears that the nature of the job opportunities developing in
the 1960’s will encourage the employment of increasing numbers of
women, including mothers. Thus, the day-care problem can become
much more serious than it is today.

Changing values in our society (Dr. Ethel J. Alpenfels, Profes­
sor of Anthropology, School of Education, New York University)
Dr. Clague’s factual statements about the changing work pat­
terns of women and the trends in our society brought into focus the
implications of these American phenomena upon the life and times of
all our people. The statistics reflected the impact of changes in our
living patterns created by the social, economic, and cultural upheaval
that we as a nation have felt. Acceptance of change is, as usual, not
without resistance, for the notion of women’s role never changing is
rooted in the age-old concept of her place in society.
Answers are hard to come by, but a provocative expose of the
dilemma at least created an atmosphere in which answers were sought.
From the field of social anthropology came a view of our own society
which put some things in better perspective and provided a frame­
work for delving into the mass of confusion that exists in relation
to fact and fancy.
Dr. Alpenfels raised a number of questions to which we as a
nation and we as individuals must seek answers. Are the values by
which we live compatible with those we claim to hold most dear? Change
is inevitable and rapid, but can we keep pace with the change and steer
a true course, with the paradoxical element of unwillingness to accept
change? Materialism is more pronounced, yet our creed denies this.
Denial of conformity is expressed, yet a stereotype of the proper exists.
In order to come to grips with the attitudes, prejudices, and bias, we
must examine our culture in light of the times with a hope of finding
the truth and being able to define the real values to be sustained.
The language of culture comes to bear in everything we do, and
we must open our ears, listen, and hear what culture says to us if we are
to cope with this conflict. Emergence of a new approach to basic values
for us as individuals and as a nation can only come from appraisal of our
culture.
What appears to be uppermost in America today is the honor
we attach to material well-being. This is the major value, and many of
us ask, "Why?”
8




Our attitudes toward work and play have all been revolutionized.
The gap between work and play arising out of an economic society has
become so great that not only the attitude, but the actuality as well,
separate work into one thing and play into another. And so work may
be unpleasant. It is something we have to do to obtain money, the
thing as a society we seem to want most. Play is for children. This
attitude toward work divides parents and children. We talk much about
leisure time, yet never before have people had less time. In addition,
we have to stop working so hard when we play and begin to play when
we work.
The last major change has to do with individualism and conform­
ity, for this ties in with our society and leads to many of the reasons by
which and for which women go out of their homes to work. One of
the values we say we prize most is that of individualism, yet conformity
seems to be rampant in our present day society. If we really believe
in individualism, then we have to teach this as a major value to children
from the day they are born.
Conflict between children and parents often stems from the con­
flict between individualism and conformity. Perhaps our greatest area
of conforming is in the obsession about possession of material goods.
Individualism abounds in the thinking of children and young people.
The decision is when to teach conformity and when to teach individual­
ism. This is bound up in our assessing our basic values and there is
room for both. Changing cultural patterns have made necessary changing
ideas in this area, and until we iron out some of the confusion, we have
trouble transmitting a solid base to children. Ideas are the core of a
nation’s strength. Opportunity to look at ideas is the most important
part of the educational system we can devise today.
In summing up, Dr. Alpenfels said that as we resolve conflicts
within our culture, we must train our girls to carry a dual role—not
only that of housewife and mother but also as part of the labor market—
using the skills which higher education has equipped her to use.
Essentially, day-care programs have the potential for setting life
patterns for many children and the best we can offer will provide the
capacity to accept freedom; individuality going hand in hand with
responsibility in a democracy.

W'hy day cure? (Mrs. Randolph Guggenheimer, President of the Na­
tional Committee for the Day Care of Children and also of the
Day-Care Council of New York City)

Recognizing the fundamental principle that no community
service ever comes into being without the support and understanding
of those in the community and adhering to the firm purpose of the
conference that day care had to be enthusiastically endorsed by volun­
teer leadership in order to come into its own, a volunteer, Mrs. Gug-




9

genheimer, was chosen to present the why’s and how’s of day care.

To understand some of the intricacies of the role of the volunteers
and to rally them to action is a major emphasis of the conference.
To ask whether a community should be concerned about day care is
like asking if it should be concerned about a pure water supply, hospi­
tals, preventing abuse of children, or any other aspect of decent com­
munity living. Long ago our society accepted that, for our own sakes,
we band together and provide some community services which can
better be provided through joint efforts than by individuals.
As free citizens, we have the right and obligation to insure that
health and welfare services and educational opportunities are available
to all people who need them. We are also a society committed to the
principle that such services should employ the most modern knowledge
and best known techniques and methods. The test, therefore, of whether
day care should be a community concern is related to the need for it.
Unfortunately, day care has less accurate research findings than
other areas of health and welfare services upon which to base its practice.
We cannot give the precise numbers of families using the service, nor the
precise numbers needing it. However, the statistics available on the
numbers of unsupervised children under 12 years of age, the numbers
of women in the working force, the numbers of broken homes, the inad­
equacy of public assistance grants, and many other pieces of information
dispel any doubt about the need for day-care services. Indications are
that the numbers of children placed in full-time foster care or institu­
tions who may never return to a family of their own could be sharply
lessened if some supplementary services to their own families were
available when needed. Though one of the most obvious preventive
and family strengthening programs, day care is usually lowest in its
priority rating.
Mrs. Guggenheimer stated that we need to know to what extent
day-care services are needed, what kind of services are required, and
whether or not those we have are satisfactory. We need to know what
values day-care services have for families where the mother is not em­
ployed. We need to follow through on their value for older children.
Every community must take part in finding answers to these
questions so that we can add to the sum total of our knowledge of what
is happening to children today in our own communities. This should be
done before they become known to the courts, to social agencies, and to
the organizations designed to deal with a family crisis. Let’s prevent the
crisis before it happens.
Another great concern of this conference is the poor care being
given children who are out of their own homes for part of the day. Lack
of community responsibility has led to the use of substandard arrange­
ments as the only alternative.
Some of the desperate conditions in which many children, who
supposedly are cared for, are forced to spend their waking hours are
appalling. We know very little about what is happening in child care
in migrant camps, yet we do know the national picture of the plight of
10




the migrant family is not a pretty one.
What day-care services there are concentrate on service to the
working mother. Many children have serious needs for day care that
have nothing to do with employment of the mother, such as illness of
the mother, emotional disturbance, death of the mother, desertion of
the mother by the father, slum living with no place to play, poor family
relationships, too many siblings with whom to share parental support
and love.
One of the things we forget is that not all parents are warm, lov­
ing, and affectionate. Many of them come from families where they
never received love or warmth and, in turn, they never learned to give it.
Day care can do one of two things—give the child the strength
he needs to withstand the pressures of a home without good relationships,
or help change the home and the attitudes of the parents. It may do both.
In many cases, a mother who works is a better mother the hours she is
at home than one who feels she is frustrated by being "nothing more
exciting than a housewife.”
Ambivalence is widespread in our society about the woman’s role.
So much of the way we live invites women to seek employment outside
the home. The stress on prestige and status related to material posses­
sions and, perhaps even more, the fact that some of us put the family on
public assistance at the bottom of the barrel can be held accountable.
This latter attitude negates the primary reason the country chose to
provide public assistance.
Day care should be used to strengthen family life and its accept­
ance should not be based on economic need. The latter should be
important only in determining the fee paid by parents.
.
Considering all the signs which tell us day-care services are vital,
we still have to face the obstacles which prevent us from obtaining what
we know is needed. First and most devastating is the lack of conviction
that we have in our selling. Even those of us who are imbued with a real
fervor for day care tend to apologize for our product. We approach the
whole matter negatively and feel impelled to explain it as a service to
be used when all else fails. If we are trying to interpret the need for
support of day care to the public, those of us who understand the pro­
gram must have real conviction about its intrinsic value.
Perhaps our apologetic attitude results from our reluctance to
accept the reality of a society that has invited women to leave home. We
urge them to go to college, to prepare for careers; we do not legislate
against their working, yet reverse ourselves by saying they should stay
home.
The argument that day-care services will make more women leave
their children and enter the labor market is sometimes used as an argu­
ment against adequate services. There is every indication that the
provision of good services in no way affects the number of women who
enter the labor force. Women work for other reasons than the presence
or absence of good child care services. Such presence or absence affects
only the child.
"We encourage women to leave their homes and support their
599015 0 -62 -3




11

children rather than accepting aid to dependent children because of the
low status we accord such assistance.”
Another obstacle is the hesitance with which we interpret the
costs of good day care. Why should we apologize for the cost of a service
to children that will preserve the best of life for them—their home life.
If we can’t sell the value of the program, we stand even less chance of
selling the cost. As a result, with inadequate funds, either substandard
operations continue to exist or fees are too high for those who most need
the service. This leads to underuse of facilities that do exist.
If a child is found half starved and abandoned, the community is
aroused and does something; if he commits a crime, he must be placed
where either containment or, hopefully, rehabilitation is the goal; but if
he is being cared for by a neighbor who hasn’t time to give him, who
leaves him unsupervised during part of the day, who may even be
moderately cruel, his plight goes unnoticed. If he is being fed, and not
getting into real trouble, and being guarded against actual physical
harm, it doesn’t seem urgent to spend 15 dollars or more a week of
community funds to care for him.
We understress the fact that day care gives children an oppor­
tunity to develop physically, mentally, and emotionally before crises
occur and that as a result, other crises can be forestalled. We neglect
to point out that day care reaches out into the community and neighbor­
hood and brings in the most disturbed families, when they are still
young and still have the possibility of being helped. We do not stress
that day care not only prevents damaging neglect but offers children
positive strengths that enable them to do better in school; to get along
better with their peers; to endure what may, despite our efforts, remain
less than desirable home conditions.
The type of neglect that the child may suffer who is cared for by
an indifferent neighbor may not seem dramatic at the time. But it
becomes dramatic, perhaps even tragic, when one considers that some­
times patterns that are laid down for children in their early years are
those which become the structure on which mental illness, juvenile
delinquency, and future poor parent-child relationships are built.
Woven throughout Mrs. Guggenheimer’s presentation was an
exploration of the barriers to the provision of good day care. There may
be many more, but wherever they are, our task is to explore methods
through which we can either break through the barriers, hurdle them,
or destroy them entirely.
No matter what attitudes prevail, the first and most important
steps are to establish need for, and then to develop and enforce high
standards. Until there is a sound and enforceable base for day-care
services, probably in a State licensing law, with teeth in it and staff to
enforce it, we will have shoddy goods to sell.
So let us amass solid facts—they, in themselves, will be dramatic.
Then we must analyze the audience we wish to convince. Parents need
help in understanding what their children need. Not only preschool
children but children of all ages require supervision during the day.
The form changes as youngsters get older, but our goal must be that
12




there is at least one adult able to answer the question, "Where is the
child?”
A different approach is needed to sell the leadership in the com­
munity. Neighborhood leadership, citywide leadership, State and
national leadership need to understand the real meaning of good day­
care services.
City and State government officials must also be reached since
public funds are the future of the day-care program. The size of the
need has already proven that voluntary funds cannot do the job. Support
from all sources—parent fees, voluntary and community chest donations,
local, State, and Federal sources—must be tapped if a sound financial
structure is to exist. If the story is well told, negative attitudes about
day care will begin to disappear and progressive action take their place.
Another suggestion for breaking the barriers probably should
have come first—get a couple of fanatics on the importance of day care.
There is no substitute for them in creating an onslaught of public
opinion. The first day nursery in this country opened its doors only
because one woman was indignant that children were being left alone
while their mothers worked. She nagged her husband and friends until
out of sheer exhaustion they capitulated. The method still works.
There is no magic formula for stimulating community concern for
day-care services. It’s the old "know your story, believe in it, and
organize ways of telling it.” The only magic in the formula is that
growing out of the love we have for children. Our society, when it
threw out the Victorian image of childhood, threw out the baby with
the bath water. As a nation, we need to get back a little more to the
image of the treasured child, to the recognition that there is nothing
maudlin or sentimental about a society that loves children—and that the
community concern that must always tower above all others is for our
children. Whatever our ambivalence about the role of women may be,
we must at least have no ambivalence about what the place of children
is. They are our future and our immortality. No monument or edifice
or pyramid has meaning except in relation to the men who will someday
see it or use it.
In closing, Mrs. Guggenheimer read portions of a letter she had
received from the then President-elect John F. Kennedy, because she
believed it augured well for the future of the day-care program.
"I wholly agree, that, in addition to Federal leadership to con­
trol and prevent juvenile delinquency, we must have provision for day
care centers for children whose mothers are unavailable during the day.
Without adequate day time care during their most formative years the
children of the nation risk permanent damage to their emotional and
moral character.
"Of the 22 million working women in 1958, almost 3 million had
children under 6 years of age and another 4,600,000 had school age chil­
dren between 6 and 17. This is cause for serious national concern.
Certainly the child welfare program and other services established under
the Social Security Act should be expanded. In addition, I believe we
must take further steps to encourage day care programs that will protect




13

our children and provide them with the basis for a full life in later years.
The suggestion of a program of research, financing and development
to serve the children of working mothers and of parents who for one
reason and another cannot provide adequate care during the day deserves
our full support.”

Day care—an essential child welfare service (Joseph H.
Reid, Executive Director of the Child Welfare League of
America)

Fact, theory, philosophy, and practical ways and means having
been explored, the presentation of day-care service in its proper jux­
taposition to all kinds of community programs was necessary. So
many components make up the day-care picture—education, health,
mental health, counseling, finances, etc.—that there is no short, straight
line demarking day-care service and placing it unequivocally under
one umbrella. However, since it is more than an educational program,
more than safety from physical harm, more than health and sanita­
tion, and embodies the whole child and his family situation, the pri­
mary focus at this point in time seems to be on the care and protection
of the child which encompasses all the other components and adds
a plus; it is a child welfare service.
In order for the conference to set its sights and circumscribe its
deliberations within reasonable limits, Mr. Reid uttered a challenge to
all the participants. He called on them for depth of thinking, a creative
approach to the problem of day care as a child welfare service, and a
realistic approach to all that had been said before.
Assuming that day-care services are within the orbit of child
welfare, we must not just bedevil the public to accept our assumption.
Of course the number one priority is to convince the public of the need
for day care and gain its understanding. Communities must be made
to understand that we endanger the lives of children and the welfare of
the community when haphazard arrangements are made for their care.
However, the proponents of day care need to reassess their product and
see if they are too professional in their approach, and if the structure of
the services offered is too formidable. Attendance at this conference
implies interest and concern for day care but let us not be complacent as
to mood—we need to take ourselves apart, not just air what we know.
Let us not be a mutual admiration society with condemnation for those
who do not see the same values we ascribe to day-care services.
Deliberations should be explorative, experimental, and creative.
If we do not have facts to substantiate what we believe, we should either
figure out ways to get them or be willing to admit they do not exist. In
the realm of day-care services for children under three, we strongly con­
demn group care—this from our knowledge of the growth and develop­
14




ment of young children, not from scientific research findings. We
should not give up this idea, but let us look hard at experiences in
other countries where infants are in group care and be sure we have
the answers straight before condemning the practice.
The standards recently recommended are higher than most of the
practices we can point to. This is as it should be—ever striving for a
higher and better world for children. On the other hand, perhaps a
realistic reappraisal of these standards may lead us to new endeavors
which can more nearly meet demands.
Most important is another look at the training and recruitment
of day-care workers in order to get programs going. The millennium
could come before any more day care comes into being if we wait for
the ideal.
Truth is never static—what is truth today may be different
tomorrow in the light of new knowledge, and if the truth is to make us
free, then we must continually press for new light. This conference
should dissect—really take the field apart—and on the basis of new
examination make services available to children who need them. Is
there something wrong with our thinking about day-care services, or is
the only impediment lack of community understanding? A fearlessness
about how we look at ourselves and our product will give us strength in
coming to grips with all the problems facing the day-care movement.

The heart of the matter
Perhaps a better way will appear on the horizon than use of
workshop or discussion groups to get at the heart of a matter. In a
democracy, this priceless exchange among people of ideas, concepts,
experiences, agreements, and disagreements has yet to be superseded
by more effective methods. Thus for this conference, bringing to­
gether those with mutual interests to delve into the problems, current
programs, assets and liabilities as well as the day-care dream resulted
in much richness in the 12 discussion groups.
Leadership for these groups was drawn from all over the coun­
try with a view not only of acquiring competence but also of inter­
spersing a multiplicity of interests, disciplines, and backgrounds.
This added zest as well as full-bodied flavor to the final production.
A comprehensive community program of day-care services
takes into account the auxiliary services needed to make day care an
effective tool for prevention of family disruption and the care and
protection of children. Day-care centers have received much more
attention than other kinds of day care, partially because the commu­
nity can view the facilities and the children in their activities, and




15

can feel a relationship to the center which is not possible with family
day care or arrangements made by parents with the neighbor or
other relatives. Community education is necessary to bring day
care into its proper focus as a preventive service. It may avert full­
time foster care and prevent family breakdown, at an early stage, by
reaching families with problems. It is also true that the social work
component in good day-care service is less tangible than the educa­
tional or health components; therefore, it usually gets short shrift
if choices have to be made or services limited.
Currently the emphasis placed on day-care service for young
children reveals that the emotional appeal seems to be the chief
bartering element. Everyone knows the preschool child must be
protected against physical hazards. The school-age child is another
story. Communities willing to support day care for young children
sometimes have difficulty in accepting the same responsibility for the
child in school. We find a great gap between services to children
under 6 and those to children up to 12 or even older. Current knowl­
edge about good mental health, emotional damage, prevention of mal­
adjustment all indicate that today’s concept of the needs of the older
child is fallacious. To those planning the conference, the logical
jumping-off place for promoting adequate day-care services, therefore,
appeared to be an assessment by the discussion groups of what a
comprehensive community service should be.

Essential elements in a good community program
Group 1: Services to preschool children (Leader: Mrs. Madeliene Siemann, Executive Director, Children’s Centers, Mills Col­
lege of Education and the New York City Department of Public
Welfare)

Group 1 concentrated on examining all facets of day-care serv­
ice for preschool children.
Mrs. Siemann began by circumscribing the scope of the task
before the group. In the context of the conference, preschool children in­
cluded those from birth to 6 years. For these children, day-care centers,
family day care, and other methods of caring for children part of the day
would need to be considered. So far as possible, nursery schools, kinder­
gartens, and play groups that have as their primary focus the education
of the child were excluded in order to carry out the purpose of the con­
ference to deal with day-care services as a community responsibility.
16




A number of questions related to services for the preschool child
were posed for the group: (1) what are the goals of good day-care serv­
ices? (2) what kind of standards do we want and how do we set them?
(3) what is the role of personnel in health, education, and social work
in providing quality day care? (4) what variety of day-care services should
be available in order to meet individual needs? and (5) what other
community services are necessary to supplement day-care services or to
serve children?
Mrs. Siemann reviewed items of specific knowledge available
which had bearing on the subject, such as statistics about working
mothers; special problems of this generation, such as broken homes,
children born out of wedlock, physical and emotional illness in families,
population mobility, and migrant families.
Mrs. Siemann went on to say that in the realm of nonstatistical
facts, and so far undisputed, is the knowledge that infants and small
children require a warm, intimate, and continuing relationship with
their mothers and that deprivation of this relationship can be a major
source of serious personality disorder. That a child’s own mother may
not be able to provide this kind of relationship is also a fact; and for the
sake of the future, society has a responsibility to find adequate sub­
stitutes for some young children.
•

Since the focal point of the entire conference was how to pro­
mote community action on behalf of day care, aspects of child growth
and development were given only cursory attention by the group.
Review of these was used only to bring the group to a common meet­
ing ground whereby they could consider community services to meet
these needs.
Although basic research neither confirms nor denies our belief
that the child under three should not be in group care, at this time,
the best we know is that sharing love and affection too broadly is not
within the capacity of the small child. We also know that there are
hundreds of children who are under three who must be cared for part
of the day by persons other than their own parents. This fact gives us
impetus to find the best for these children. Far too little has been
done in the field of family day care.
Family day care is that service which is under the auspices
of a social work agency where a daytime home, with a daytime mother,
is found to meet the need of the particular child. Each home is
selected for each child, taking into account the personalities and
problems of the natural mother and the capabilities of the daytime
mother.
A family day-care home should have few if any other small
children in it so that the infant or toddler can have the attention from
a loving adult which he needs and does not have to share this affection
too much. The balancing of the care of the child in two settings is




17

one of the important reasons for casework supervision. This kind
of day-care placement requires constant supervision and must be
guided by skilled social work staff.
Admitting the deplorable situations into which some young
babies and children are being placed, the group saw family day care
as an urgent need in every community. A few agencies have done a
magnificent job in experimenting and demonstrating with this serv­
ice. This type of care is expensive, but not as expensive as broken
homes. Promotion of family day care should come close to having
first priority in the overall effort for more adequate day-care service.
The whole gamut of community services for children and their
families must be included in the community’s purview. Relationships
with the juvenile and family court should be appraised; homemaker
service may be an answer to some needs; but certainly the entire
public assistance and public child welfare program is vital to the
development of adequate day care. All of this may have particular
significance for the child under school age. Many working mothers
who have children under 6 work because of dire financial need. A
mother should not be forced to work solely for financial reasons.
Without counseling services, day-care service, particularly for the
young child, may be used inadvisedly. Adequate intake service, there­
fore, is essential in establishing suitable arrangements.
Psychiatric and psychological consultation are a must as part
of a good program. Health services, both in conjunction with the
day-care program and within the community, are essential.
A creative approach to family need must be found whereby
parents can be involved in an ongoing educational, informational pro­
gram. To hold meetings is not enough. Working parents, or those
with the least stability, the immature, the harassed, may not attend.
Ways and means must be found to draw such parents into the pro­
gram, and this responsibility falls upon the agency, itself. It is an
essential element of good service.
Family day care seems to be the most practical program for
the young child but needs to be considered for older siblings, too,
especially in view of bonds of affection and healthy family patterns.
Separation of children according to chronological age is not neces­
sarily best. Again the expert caseworker takes into account the en­
tire family constellation before making a judgment.
Distribution of day-care services throughout a community is
very important. For the young child, traveling from one end of
town to the other adds to the strain of a long day. Location of service
within the neighborhood of children being served is vital to a good
community program.
Not all parents will come to agencies for help. Often they
seek an easier way out by using neighbors who are available rather
18



than go through the process of intake which is necessary if good
diagnosis of each situation is to take place. Responsibility for inter­
pretation and sympathetic understanding rests with the community
and its agencies.
Efforts to enlist the cooperation of employers, both individually
and collectively, is part of the responsibility of the community. Per­
haps we have to be more creative in finding help for the sole bread­
winner who must remain at home when his child is ill.
Nursery school education is an essential part of the day-care
center for the young child. That it has to be altered and varied ac­
cording to the long hours day-care centers may need to serve children
does not negate the vital role it plays nor the values it provides.
Standards of personnel in all centers should meet if not exceed those
required by nursery schools. Good personnel practices and salary
scales are exceedingly important for the effective operation of a day­
care center.

Group 2: Services to school-age children (Leader: Dr. W. Ma­
son Mathews, Merrill-Palmer Institute of Human Development
and Family Life)

Although no artificial barrier determines the upper age when
a child no longer needs care and protection during the day if his
mother or relatives are unable to provide it, discussion of day-care
services for school-age children was limited to those up to 12 years
of age.
Since the majority of children of school age have the ability
to form relationships with many people, the concentration of the
discussion revolved around the day-care center rather than family
day care. But even though the majority do fit into group experiences,
a community must be wary of falling into the trap of assuming that
group care meets the need of all children. A careful assessment of
the child’s family and school relationships may reveal for some indi­
viduals a very desperate need for more individual treatment than
even a small group can provide. A comprehensive community pro­
gram must provide for the school-age child who needs a family to
supplement his own.
In order to delimit its discussion, the group assumed that a
day-care center is a public or voluntary facility where children are
cared for during the day, outside of their own homes, by qualified
people in suitable physical surroundings. To some, this assumption
exceeded the bounds of realism. Many more school-age children are
cared for in the commercial or proprietary centers, through partial
599015 0 -62 -4




19

participation in public recreation centers, by after school activities on
a limited basis, utilization of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other organ­
ized groups, than are found in day-care centers. The arrangements
with neighbors, babysitters, and other relatives are much more casual
for this age group than for the young child, even though the potential
for permanent damage is as great. The large number of totally un­
supervised children falls in this age bracket. Any community that
permits its children to go unsupervised runs tremendous risks in
terms of future individual and community problems.
In order to plan for a comprehensive community program of
day-care services for school-age children, Dr. Mathews pointed out the
first approach is to look at the known facts about child growth and
development.
A child functions as a whole child in his world, not just in his
skin. The adult world has a great responsibility for providing the best
possible opportunity for a child to become a mature person—a person
who is comfortable with himself and who can take responsibility for
his own behavior without blaming others for his weaknesses.
For this kind of growing up, a warm and vivid emotional climate
is necessary. Warm and loving relationships provide this climate. If
children do not feel loved and wanted, their emotional development is
affected. Their capacity for responding emotionally becomes narrow,
or they may react in highly emotional, negative ways.
Children need developmental experiences in which intellectual
and emotional learnings are integrated. They need experiences that are
clearly structured but give them freedom to think, explore, and create.
They need to be with people who can help them learn what it means to
use this freedom well, how to take increasing responsibility for making
their own decisions and dealing with the consequences.
Today day-care facilities vary greatly in their goals, policies,
housing, schedules, and practices. This variety is good if there are some
general principles behind these differences. Unfortunately, the day­
care movement is not yet soundly based on generalizations which can be
widely used as guides for developing local projects. Before plans for
expansion gain too much momentum, we must be surer of our founda­
tions. Old ideas need to be reexamined in terms of new purposes.
It is imperative that all the agencies serving children intensify
and coordinate their efforts to provide the environments in which these
kinds of learning can go on, because we are moving faster today in the
area of material change than in our understanding of our own emotional
and intellectual growth.

The members of the group considered the day-care center as
an agency evolving out of the needs of our time to take its place with
the other community agencies serving children and families. They
felt strongly that if day-care services are good for children of working
20




mothers, they are good for any children who need care and supervision
during the day. The increasing lack of safe places for children to
play, especially in cities, is making it necessary to plan for many
children in the development of community day-care facilities. Handi­
capped children should very definitely be included in planning for
day care.
Standards for day care should represent the combined ex­
perience, wisdom, and training of people in many professional fields.
The common denominator is knowledge of what is reliably known
about child growth and development.
The group felt that in addition to the protection they offer,
good day-care services have unique potentialities for enriching the
lives of children.
Unless school-age children enjoy the activities provided, they
will not come to the center. Attendance among these older youngsters
has dwindled in some of the larger programs.
Many instances of cooperation on the part of schools were
cited. In California, the program is sponsored and, in part, finan­
cially supported by the public schools. In Philadelphia, teachers are
helping to write a guide for the day-care program. In New York
City, relationships between schools and centers are extremely close.
Opinion in the group seemed to be divided on the wisdom of
involving children and parents in setting goals and in the management
of the center. All agreed that close working relations with parents
are essential and that the best way to win the confidence of parents
is to listen carefully when they are ready to talk. Unless there is
two-way communication between parents and center personnel, the
center cannot possibly know’ enough about the home and family life
to plan care for its children.
The group did not consider in any detail the questions on com­
munity relations, evaluation, and qualifications of personnel. It wTas
agreed that adequate day-care programs cannot be provided under
wholly voluntary resources because of the cost. For this reason, if for
no other, it was felt essential that community participation in pro­
grams be on as wide a basis as possible. People are apt to be interested
in and supportive of the projects they help to develop.
Following is a summary of the elements the group considered
essential in a day-care program of the scope and quality required:
1. The right auspices.
Day care is a cooperative service which can be rendered
under a number of different auspices, public, voluntary, and
proprietary. The program should be sponsored in each State




21

by the group or groups which can develop it best and obtain
for it the widest support,
2. Clearly stated goals.
In general, the goals should be to strengthen family life
by providing a service which supplements what families
can do to help children grow and develop.
3. Proper standards.
These should be based on professional principles and knowl­
edge of the needs of children, families, and communities.
4. Well-developed intake policies.
These must be related to the goals, policies, and scope of
the program. They should include diagnostic evaluation of
the individual needs of the child and his family in order to
provide suitable services. They must be made known to and
clearly understood by referring agencies, to parents who use
or may want to use the service, and to other people in the
community.
5. Qualified staff.
They should have warm and friendly personalities, respect
for children and their parents, and a natural interest in them
as individuals. People qualified for work in day-care centers
are people who have the proper education and training for
the positions they fill.
6. Professional counseling services.
Every center should have on its regular staff, or available
on a consultant basis, a person professionally qualified to
counsel with parents and help staff with problems involving
family and community relationships.
7. A schedule adjusted to the needs of the children, their families,
and the general community situation.
8. A dynamic program geared to the developmental needs of the
children involved.
9. Adequate space.
This means a generous amount of space both indoors and
out for carrying on the program of the center.
10. Equipment and materials.
These tools for carrying out the program should be selected
on the basis of safety, durability, suitability, versatility, and
creativity.




11. Close, friendly working relationships with parents.
This means taking advantage of opportunities for casual
contacts with parents as well as interviews with them by
appointment.
12. Close working relations with school administrators, teachers,
and maintenance personnel.
A child’s day should be planned as a whole. Activities in
the school and the center should not overlap, duplicate each
other, or conflict.
13. Close coordination with the other social, educational, recrea­
tional, and health agencies in the community serving children
and families.
14. A recognized place in community planning.
Careful appraisals of community needs and resources
should precede a decision to set up a day-care service. Joint
planning with parents, businesses, industries, welfare, educa­
tional and health agencies concerned is essential.
15. Adequate financing.
It is highly important to know how much a given day-care
program will cost and how it will be paid for before commit­
ments are made.
As the program grows, opportunities will increase for co­
ordinating Federal, State, and local financial resources as well
as parents’ fees for it. These should all be carefully explored.
16. Evaluation.
Evaluation should be a continuing process based on a sound
plan for assessing the component parts of the service.

In conclusion, the chairman spoke of some of the points made
by the group which were not strictly essential elements but had a
bearing on these. There seemed to be a general feeling that day
care, in its contemporary form, is a social invention which should
be developed with caution. It should not be adopted as a program
universally desirable or necessary for the healthy development of
all children. Child development is primarily a parental responsi­
bility. Day-care service is a supplemental and not a substitute service
for families. People should not be enticed into it, but families who
need it should know about it through varied and far-reaching plans
for interpretation.
Communities must be alert to the needs for day care. These
needs often do not appear until a crisis develops. As they look to




23

the needs and plan to meet them, communities should also look at the
reasons why many mothers work outside their own homes.

Varieties of services
Group 3: Special needs of children (Leader: Miss Esther Middlewood, Chief, Education Section, Michigan Department of
Mental Health)

Some children and some families have peculiar and special
kinds of needs for day care. These require concerted and extraordi­
nary consideration.
This group delved into these special needs of children, including
services to the mentally or physically handicapped, the emotionally
disturbed child, the child of minority groups, those living in over­
crowded slum areas, and the gifted child. The questions posed were
geared to community responsibility and were intended to increase
awareness of problems. If the day-care program is one which can
meet some community needs, how should a community provide these
services? Is it feasible, credible, and advantageous to include handi­
capped children in regular programs ? If not, does each special need
get fragmentized, and how many fragments are reasonable? What
variety and type of day-care service is needed to accommodate the
child with special needs: family day-care centers for the handicapped,
the gifted, children from minority groups, etc.? What do we do
about the provision of day care in overcrowded slum areas where
the special need is lack of adequate space and where the economic base
is low?
Miss Middlewood appropriately divided the discussion into
two sections: needs of special groups of children, and special needs
of children.
Material emerging from the discussion on special needs of
children has been covered in other sections of this report, so will be
dealt with perfunctorily here.
In discussing the needs of special groups of children, the
group came to a quick and definite conclusion that all the day-care
services, plus the community services available to any child, should
be available to atypical children whether or not their deviation from
normal is obvious.
Care is the first essential; consequently, diagnostic and eval­
24



uative services are imperative in order that the kind of care needed
is discovered without fumbling. Some extras are in order for the
handicapped child whether he he physically or mentally handicapped
or handicapped by severe deprivation such as the migrant child, the
child in city slums, the child in rural counties, and the child of minor­
ity groups. Teachers with special skills may be needed to work with
these groups of children. Intensified work with the child’s family is
also probably in order. More casework, health consultation services,
and cooperation among all agencies on a continuing basis should be
an essential part of such day-care services.
When children with special problems can be integrated into
existing day-care programs, this appears preferable. The bulk of
handicapped children may need special settings geared to their abil­
ities. Community responsibility does not cease when it provides
only for the normal or average child.

Group 4: Special needs of employed parents (Leader: Julius
F. Rothman, Staff Representative, AFL-CIO, Community Serv­
ices Activities)

This group dealt with the particular problems faced by families
where both parents are employed, or where there is but one parent
who is also the breadwinner.
Some of the questions around which Mr. Rothman led discus­
sion indicated considerable concern for the mother who, if she works,
carries in reality two full-time jobs. This in and of itself creates family
problems, employer problems, employee problems, and thus lends cre­
dence to the fact that such families have special kinds of needs.
Do industry and labor have a stake in good day-care services?
To what extent have the needs of employers contributed to the estab­
lishment of day-care services within an industry, and what problems does
this create?
A family in need of day-care services where both parents are
employed is often in the lower income brackets. The low economic
status compounds the problems to be met by day-care services in that the
mother carrying almost two full-time jobs has so little time and energy
to give devoted, loving attention to the children when she is at home.
Respite from any of the household chores is not available to her.

The group gave prime consideration to the special need of em­
ployed parents for sound counseling service provided by highly skilled
social workers, so that the total family situation and the family need
for day care could be fully explored. If sound counseling is available
to mothers before they enter employment, it is possible to acquaint




25

them with alternate solutions to financial difficulties. Often other
resources exist within a community which may better fit the individual
family than the mother’s employment. Mothers who sometimes out
of desperation seek employment, because it seems to be the one solu­
tion, fail to assess accurately the additional cost of going out to work,
the problem of the sick child, and the drain on their own emotional
and physical well-being.
Unfortunately, the general community attitude toward the
mother who seeks employment has not kept pace with the changing
social and cultural scene. Members of the group repeatedly em­
phasized the need for a community education program to create a
climate which does not stigmatize the working mother, particularly
where the father is also employed and living at home. Concomitant
with this is the necessity for dignifying the status of day-care services
and developing community understanding about the imperative need
for professional service to children, particularly those who cannot be
with their own parents during most of their waking hours.
Day-care homes and centers should be neighborhood based.
Schools, churches, and other neighborhood organizations should have a
close working relationship with the day-care services. Services which
are too far from home base have little opportunity to include parents in
the program.
One of the most important aspects of location of service is the
need to make periodic studies of need for service. The population is
mobile and communities change—where a neighborhood has no need
this year, next year a shift may produce a different picture.
Business, labor, and industry have a vital part to play in build­
ing understanding and support for community day-care services.
Some have already recognized the fact that employed mothers may
need special consideration, such as part-time employment, a different
work shift, time off from the job when the children are ill, or for
the period of the child’s adjustment to the day-care service, whether
it is in a group center or a part-time home. If, as employers claim,
and facts support their claim, that women workers are vital to a
healthy economy, then employers have a responsibility to make adjust­
ments which will not deprive children of their essential care nor de­
prive parents of their rightful responsibility.
Planning by community committees with broad representation
from all facets of the community, including civic groups, employers,
labor, church groups, professional people, parents, day-care personnel,
and State licensing representatives, is important if the development
of day-care service is to get off dead center.
The excellence of many commercial or proprietary day-care
services was recognized by this group. Because of the high cost of
these services, fees are often prohibitive for families on marginal
26




incomes. As a result, parents are forced to make inadequate arrange­
ments with neighbors or elderly relatives. The import of this cannot
be minimized. Some way must be found to bring day-care services
within the means of the family who needs them. The opinion was
strongly expressed that only through public funds will adequate day­
care services become a reality, and that although the price may sound
high at first hearing, it can in no way be compared to the exorbitant
cost of maladjustment, broken homes, full-time placement of children,
and future emotional breakdown.
Fathers as well as mothers have a terrific stake in good day
care and should not be ignored or left out of the picture. Of par­
ticular concern is the one parent family. This is usually the mother,
but not always. Unless services are available, in desperation the
family may disintegrate. Of prime importance is the necessity to
reexamine the public assistance program in light of its purpose; that
is, not to deprive children of their own families for economic reasons
solely. In many communities, the aid to dependent children benefits
do not meet even minimal need. In a sense, this creates coercion on the
parent to leave children to find employment and negates the original
intent of the assistance program.
Consideration of the assets and liabilities of establishing day­
care centers within business and industry elicited negative responses
from the group. Hospitals and some industrial plants have experi­
mented with this. Usually these are established primarily to entice
personnel and to ensure their long-term employment. Often the
standards are low. Often mothers under such circumstances get
caught in untenable working situations but continue to work because
there is no other resource for the children. These centers are likely
to be far removed from the child’s home neighborhood and he is cut
off from friends, attends different schools, must make a whole new
set of playmates. Having the mother on the premises may not balance
the hazards of this kind of service.
The needs of employed parents, wherever they may be, must be
examined and reexamined if flexibility in day-care services is to be
assured. As the pendulum of economic change swings, the services
must change in accord. This cannot be left to the handful of people
working in day-care service but will demand the best talents of each
community and the energies of many.

Group 5: Special needs of families (Leader: Mrs. Leon M. Gins­
berg, Honorary Chairman, Maryland Committee on Group Day
Care of Children)

This group tackled the complex problem of meeting special




27

needs of families for day care.
Mrs. Ginsberg pointed out that communities find it easier to
understand the need for day care of children whose mothers work than
they do for the care of children in families with special needs.
While economic necessity is the reason most often given for the
need for day care, and is the reason most children are in day care of
whatever sort, other problems loom large in documenting need. For
example, working mothers are easier to count than the number of fam­
ilies with other kinds of situations affecting children. Many children
are in day care because they present behavior problems, illness at home,
too many young children in the family and the mother does not have
enough time for each of them, grandparents living at home, strained
family relationships, immature parents, and so on. Comparatively few of
these children turn up in day-care facilities largely because we who have
the knowledge have not had the temerity to speak boldly and with
courage about the matter. Thus is created the inevitable circle of too
little day-care service, too little exploration of need, too little under­
standing in the community, too little power to move, too little organi­
zation, and too few facts.

In the discussion, some basic premises were laid down which,
while not new, bear repeating. Implicit in planning for day-care
services is that we cannot differentiate between the child’s and the
family’s need. Any community program which exists to serve fam­
ilies must be family centered, whether the need stems from a child’s
problem or from some other aspect of family life. In order to arrive
at a plan of choice for a family, a whole range of services should be
available within a community to meet the wide variety of needs.
In selecting group or family day care as a choice of service,
the following factors should be taken into consideration:
1. The strength of family relationships, together with the ability
of parents to provide the support needed by the child in ad­
justing to separation from the home and to a new environment.
2. The values, wishes, and preference of the family in terms of day
care meeting its needs.
3. The opportunities which day care can afford for working with
families toward the goal of strengthening family life and con­
tributing to the development of the child.
4. The quality of day-care service available.
5. The age of the child, together with his ability to benefit from
group day care or family day care.
6. The number and ages of children within the family.
28




These factors are not too different from those to be considered
for the family without special kinds of problems, but they do high­
light the need for quality service to all children. This group like
others recognized that the same prods to communities are relevant,
whether there is a special or general need for day-care service. Thus
the reiteration about what to do runs throughout all the group dis­
cussions of the conference.

Promoting adequate standards
Group 6: Licensing and consultation (Leader: Malcolm S. Host,
Executive Director, Houston Day Care Association)

Through good statutes, society can guarantee the quality of
care and protection to children who must be out of their own homes
for part of a day. Good will on the part of a few is not enough to
assure that high standards of service will be met in a community.
Neither can it be assumed that people of good intentions and loving
nature will know by instinct what is best for children. Consequently,
many States have provided basic legislation covering the licensing of
day-care homes and centers. States have also developed standards
by which to judge the adequacy of the care children receive. These
indicate the importance of licensing and consultation in promoting
better day-care services.
Mr. Host opened the discussion by reviewing the current status of
licensing and consultation in the Nation with a view to setting the stage
for better understanding of this facet of the total day-care program.
The responsibility for licensing generally rests with the State
departments of public welfare, but this function is sometimes lodged
with State departments of health or education. Whichever department
has major responsibility, it is essential that all three work together to
develop good standards because all three have important parts to play
in the provision of good day-care services. It is at the State level that
coordination of these three disciplines should take place and each must
be willing to cooperate with and have respect for the contribution of the
others.
While many States have laws for licensing day-care services,
standards vary greatly among the States. In some, licensing is manda­
tory; in some, permissive. Some States have no personnel to enforce the
law even when it is^specific. Those who are most involved see day care
as both a preventive and a protective service. Communities sometimes
are unaware of the importance of these preventive and protective aspects




29

and do not recognize their responsibility for supporting good legislation
and standards.
Personnel who license services must understand the variety of
attitudes prevailing in any community toward licensing and lay plans to
gain ground in an orderly fashion. Many people believe higher stand­
ards will increase the cost to the community (and they will); others see
higher standards as decreasing their profit; some believe that the State
has no right to exercise control in this area; some people decry the role
and motives of the proprietary operation; and there are those who get
discouraged that the whole world cannot be reformed by tomorrow.
Representatives of all groups in a community should be involved
in developing good standards so that there is substantial support for the
end product.
Sometimes a difference exists between the actual licensing provi­
sions and standards. Currently licensing provisions often represent
minimum requirements and standards, higher goals toward which there
should be movement. This probably happens in any new area of service.
A State starts with what is practically attainable, then moves step by
step to improve its program. This is why the actual process of granting
a license goes hand in hand with a consultation service. It is through
consultation with trained personnel that standards of service are most
likely to be raised.

The group in opening its discussion quickly came to some
general agreements. First, no acceptable reason exists for exempting
children from their right of protection under law whether day-care
service is offered under public, voluntary, or proprietary auspices.
The group was particularly concerned about church groups which
in some States are exempted from the law. Second, there was agree­
ment that the State is the level at which day-care programs should be
licensed. There was not agreement in which department the State
should place responsibility for the licensing and consultation pro­
gram.
Standards vary among different departments and sometimes
are not related to the needs of children. Consequently, it is imperative
that whichever department has responsibility, it must have the help
of other departments in establishing a full and complementary set
of standards that will meet children’s needs.
In no State is there a single standard administered to all kinds
of day-care programs by one department. In some States, day-care
programs for the handicapped are licensed by the State health or
mental health departments; day-care centers by the department of
public welfare, etc. The group believed that any program designed
to meet needs of a selected group of children, such as the handicapped,
should meet the basic requirements for all programs and, in addition,
provide for these special needs. It, therefore, appeared that one
30




department should have responsibility for licensing all day-care
services.
The group also agreed that any licensing law must be enforce­
able and must contain minimum standards below which no program
would be permitted to operate. Unless the law is enforceable, mini­
mum standards are not minimum and children are left unprotected.
However, the group recognized that protection is afforded when an
educational program is used to develop community understanding and
support for higher standards. To promote such a program of com­
munity education is part of the consultation aspect of the service. The
group also believed that every operator of any kind of day-care pro­
gram, even those involving only one child, should be licensed.
Bringing agencies up to par is a long process, and one means
for accomplishing this is through granting provisional licenses.
What was a minimum standard and how long a program should be
allowed to stay at that level was not resolved, but it was clear that
licensing is being carried on in some instances at a very low level,
partly due to acceptance of the philosophy that “it is all we can expect.”
Although the focus of this discussion group was on providing
adequate protection to children, members of the group pointed out
that adequate licensing and consultation service provides protection
to the agency or owner who operates the service.
In discussing the protective aspects provided the operator of
day-care services, the group pointed out that obtaining a license gives
status to the service. The coexistence of shoddy, cheap, or spectacular
programs creates competition difficult for good services to face. Rec­
ognition by parents and the general community of good day care is
sometimes enhanced by the licensing program.
Day-care licensing should include certain elements, such as
responsibility to locate, identify, and list all facilities caring for chil­
dren who are not related to the person providing the care; authority
to visit and evaluate what is being done for and with children under
care. Visits to observe, inspect, and consult should not be restricted
to the time of issuing the license.
Consultation and assistance to help a facility to achieve im­
proved standards should be mandatory as well as the inspection serv­
ice. Authority goes with consultation in some of its aspects but should
be done in a positive spirit of helping people see possibilities for im­
proving the service from which they can make their own choices. If
the consultant has the welfare of children as the focus of his consul­
tation, consultation will be on a continuing basis and not a perfunctory
task. The services of a good consultant will be sought by agencies
and operators, and he will not need to use his authority in order to
work with them.




31

Thinking of licensing standards as mere minimums has led
to standards which are too low. Conversely, application of high
standards without providing a process for reaching them has led to
closing agencies which might have been helped to provide much
needed service to a community.
These two extremes can be obviated by providing standards
that can be attained in steps: (1) a standard which is the floor below
which service is not acceptable; (2) a higher standard toward which
agencies must work steadily and relatively quickly, during which time
a provisional license is issued; and (3) a standard which represents
the kind of program that is desirable and toward the achievement of
which consultation is provided. The group stated that caution is
necessary in establishing the floor or minimum standard so that it is
not just what currently exists but what it should be. This floor must
prevent damaging experiences to children and provide the bare
essentials for a growing personality.
Communication among States, among national agencies con­
cerned with children, and among agencies of the Federal Government
is vital on this matter of licensing practice and procedure. It is
scarcely credible that children in different parts of the country really
have such differing needs as is currently evidenced by the variety of
laws in existence. The consultation service should be available to
parents, community, and legislative bodies also.
Community understanding undergirds the legislative action
which is necessary for a licensing and consultation service-to have
effect. Uninformed parents often use programs which are out­
rageously poor because they have no backdrop against which to
measure values and, therefore, cannot make valid judgments on what
they use.
On rare occasions, employers have been known to oppose the
licensing of day-care services because mistakenly they see this as a
hazard to obtaining a supply of labor. Education of employer groups
is partially the responsibility of the licensing agency.
Standards for the licensing and consultation service should be
established to insure that the process, personnel, procedures, and
other resources be sufficient both in quality and quantity to provide the
necessary protection of the program.
There was a strong expression of the need for the Children’s
Bureau to develop, along with others, a guide to standards for li­
censing so that the States need not flounder in their search for
adequacy.
Obviously the foregoing leads to providing for education and
training qualifications of staff within the law. These are not fool­
proof but, all things being equal, less risk to agencies, communities,
and parents and children is likely to occur if these are established.
32




Since there are not enough qualified people to go around, effective
inservice training must be provided. Formal training is not available
in all sections of the country, but this is no reason for the failure to
supply adequate people to the licensing and consultation staff. Many
places provide a training program and State university extension
services have been most helpful in it. The result of such programs
is a visible and commendable upgrading of day-care service.
Research is needed and should be used to develop good stand­
ards. The absence of research does not need to deter the battle for
improvement.

Group 7: Personnel and training (Leader: Dr. Donald Brieland
Director, Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund)

This group had the task of searching for some common denomi­
nators which would lead to obtaining adequate personnel for day-care
services.
Dr. Brieland described some of the problems facing day care in
obtaining the best possible standards for personnel together with the
training program involved in this. The development of training stand­
ards for personnel is difficult and has been characteristically absent from
most of the standards for licensing by State departments of health, educa­
tion, or welfare.
It is particularly difficult, given the realities of supply and demand
and of financing, to secure people adequately trained in early childhood
education to work with every group of children in day-care centers.
How can partially trained staff and volunteers, working under the super­
vision of fully trained staff members, be used more effectively?
_ The trends toward earlier marriage and earlier establishment of
families, desirable as they may be for society, make the term of service
of many workers in day care, as in many other fields, very brief. This
would suggest a need for discussion of intensive inservice training pro­
grams based on a clear recognition of the attitudes and skills most neces­
sary for the worker.

Briefly the discussion that followed fell into seven categories:
standards, personality requirements, training, inservice training,
integration of disciplines, recruitment, and recommendations for
financing training programs.
Generally, statements of standards, the group believed, should
be considered as minimums, and should be accompanied by statements
of goals, with emphasis on the goals. Standards and goals should be
the same for all types of day care—public, voluntary, and proprietary.
Training requirements for day-care workers should be on a
level with the requirements for comparable positions in other fields,




33

and salaries should be commensurate with the degree of training
required.
Personality requirements suitable to a staff position should
include serious consideration of the mothering aspect of day-care
services. Emphasis should be placed on both the personality evalua­
tion of students in training institutions and on personality require­
ments in standards set for job appointment.
Instruments are needed for screening and testing applicants for
positions. The group strongly recommended that evaluation of pro­
spective candidates for positions include a report from the training
institution on personality as well as ability.
The group affirmed the spirit of the recommendation on train­
ing of the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth “that
every group care center for young children be supervised by at least
one person qualified in early childhood education.” This was con­
sidered a minimum standard, however, rather than a goal. Training
for teaching staff in day care should include a knowledge of family
life as well as a knowledge of child growth and development.
One of the major differences between a day-care center and a
nursery school is the need of the child in day care for mothering since
he spends more hours of the day in the center, which becomes a home
supplement. Differences need to be spelled out so that training can
be focused on day-care needs. Special courses for day-care personnel
should be offered by training institutions.
Day care for the school-age child is not an extension of school,
nor is it a recreational program. It requires staff who understand
the developmental needs of the 6- to 12-year-old, and can provide a
program around the interests of that age group. Training institutions
need to be encouraged to develop courses focused on day care for this
age group. Some provision for educational leave or scholarship sup­
port should be available.
Although this group concentrated on the training of educational
personnel, within the framework of its discussion laid implications for
the training of workers in health and welfare.
Recruitment for personnel in the day-care field is a problem of
great proportions because of the irregular hours of work and because
of inadequate personnel policies and low salaries. Day care does have
advantages and satisfactions, but these must be highlighted as a means
of attracting qualified persons to the field.
The following were suggested as means of aiding recruitment:
1. Developing model personnel policies such as are available in
other fields.
2. Building in the public mind a proper image of day care.
34




3. Encouraging students to enter the field at both the high school
and college levels.
High school students through child development courses and
organizations such as Future Teachers of America should
be given satisfying experiences in a day-care setting. At the
college level, student teacher assignments to day-care centers
should be encouraged. Vocational technical high schools,
through their child care training courses, are a potential
source of trained aides.
4. Appealing to the older age group of professional employables to
return to service.
This might involve providing refresher courses.

In a service so vital to the welfare of the future of our country,
every possible effort must be made to preserve and improve it by
continuous and effective recruitment.

Promoting community responsibility

Group 8: Factfinding (Leader: Dr. Edward E. Schwartz, Profes­
sor, School of Social Service Administration, University of
Chicago)

To gain support for any project, we must be armed with facts.
For this reason, the most urgent requirement in a campaign of pro­
motion of day-care services is to develop adequate methods for fact­
finding on the nature of the problem, its size, present facilities—their
quantity and their quality and their costs, and why some efforts are
successful while others fail.
Dr. Schwartz pointed out that research demonstration and re­
corded evidence are the tools to use but how they are used affects what
happens. He asked the group members to say, first, what they thought,
then think further about what they had said.
Common ground was sought by the group through a review
of common human needs of all people, for food, love, warmth, and
security. Then the group moved to the necessity for community action
to provide for these needs when individuals or their families cannot
do so.
If enough people have the same problem, the need becomes a
social problem when it cannot be worked out with the available re­




35

sources in the community. Studies of the need for social services such as
day care are concerned with the kind, quality, and conditions of services
required to control, treat, and prevent social problems.
Who requires day-care services? At first glance, the problem
may seem to be only that of the family or the child. Many families
need care for their children. In I960, the child, industry, community,
parents, and families all have need for day-care services. The child needs
day care; industry needs manpower; the community needs overall health
and well-being; parents need help in sharing responsibility for their
children; families need care for their children.

The group circumscribed its look at need to our own society
and made no effort to make comparisons with other societies or other
countries. It did suggest the necessity of comparing various ways of
caring for children within our own culture and looking at facts rather
than agreeably deciding to support what we think we now know.
Is the basic problem the exploration of the abstract nature of
the need for day-care services, or exploration of what happens when
children do not have this need met ? What kind of data do we have
about the number of children being damaged or limited by the kind
of care they receive ? How quickly do we recognize when substitute
care is needed ? Do we know what childen are being harmed either
by lack of day care, or by the type of day care they are receiving? If
adequate care is not available, then our “need meeting” society must
provide for each child to develop to his fullest. The community has
ultimate responsibility for determining the standards it wants for
its children. Should there be minimal standards wdiich represent
acceptance by the community of its responsibility and plus standards
which represent professional ideals ?
How can we foster the concept that parents are a part of the
community with the right to decide what they want? Should we
recognize the fact that we are a completely interdependent society and
parents cannot discharge all the functions of child rearing without
help ? This concept has long been accepted in terms of fire protection,
pure water supply, health protection, etc. That some parents do not
know they need help with child care does not negate the fact that
they do, and a reaching out process on the part of the community is
essential.
After itemizing and specifying many goals, the following goal
statements emerged: Communities must look at their responsibility to
provide needed daytime care for children by first finding out what the
needs are and then see that needed services are provided. In view
of the awareness of the receptive climate of the general population
for meeting human needs, this group expressed the hope that legisla­
tive support would be forthcoming for the promotion of community
responsibility for child welfare services, in general, and day care of
36




children, in particular.
Comprehensive and reliable operating statistics on the kind
and volume of services being provided by public, voluntary, and
proprietary services are essential.
Kesearch is essential in the following areas: on the nature of
primary needs of children, mothers, and families for day care; the
manifestation of the individual and social problems which may be
present due to failure to meet needs; the effectiveness of specific types
of services in relation to other costs; values and attitudes of different
sectors of the community as to what the rights of others are, and the
way of insuring them; how priorities are determined for providing
day care in relation to other needed services.
The group placed particular stress on the need for factfinding
to include assumption of responsibilities by Federal operating and
research agencies for promoting the improvement and standardization
of operating statistics; and the direct conduct of research. State
agencies and research agencies should be utilized for the production
of service statistics, surveys, special studies, and research.
Again and again, the group pointed out that no effective com­
munity action is likely to be forthcoming unless facts are known and
that too much effort to promote day-care services without basis in
fact is lost motion.

Group 9: The community’s stake in good day care
(Leader: Mrs. Virgil Gilmore, Treasurer, Day Nurseries,
Charleston, West Virginia)

This group believed that most of the objections to day-care
services stem from misconceptions about the effect such services have
on the general atmosphere of the community in which people live.
Social maladjustment, deprivation, and neglect of a few can spread
tentacles of the same problems throughout the community.
Mrs. Gilmore defined the community’s stake in day care and more
particularly in good day care. The problem has two different faces.
If the community is considered as the simple sum of the individuals and
families who compose it, the return to the community from good day
care would be the sum of the individual instances in which day care had
promoted family solidarity and stability. If the community is considered
as something more than, or at least different from, the sum of its parts,
good day-care services carry other values: (1) They could raise the
community’s standard of parental care; (2) They could make communi­
ties more aware of the value of kindergarten and nursery education




37

where these do not exist; (3) They could tend to drive out bad day care
by‘providing a standard against which good day care can be measured.

This group chose to accept the term “community” as being
equally applicable to a neighborhood, a town or city, a State or even
the Nation, depending upon the frame of reference. Communities,
whatever the frame of reference, have varying concepts of their stake
in day care. States that have no licensing laws for the protection of
children receiving day-care services are communities that do not recog­
nize their stake at all.
Other than a general failure to appreciate the basic needs of
children, the fundamental cause of poor day care was considered to
be primarily economic. Good day care is too expensive to flourish
naturally in the absence of enforceable standards and a general public
concern. Wrestling with all the facets of good and bad standards,
the group emerged with a firm conviction that of all the problems
created by bad day care, group care of infants is the most pressing.
Members of the group made repeated reference to the need for
studies contrasting the effect of good day-care service with poor day­
care service. The kind of services implied by the term “good day
care” in 1960 were so new and different from past concepts that not
enough time had elapsed to properly evaluate these new ideas. Such
studies must be undertaken if good day care is to survive.
A feeling that commanded considerable support was that
parents are free to put a child into any kind of day care they wish—
good, bad, or indifferent. Community pressures, therefore, should be
applied to both the purveyors of day care and to the consumers, and
the community has a large stake in making sure only good day care
is made available.
Financing of day care was ushered in with a carefully thought
out statement that the Federal Government has a stake in day care
and that it properly should share with States and local communities
in the support of this social service. One person demurred on this
and placed total responsibility upon the local community. The group
reacted to this by expressing the opinion that by the pragmatic test
of performance, local communities were not putting sufficient money
into day care either for staff, program, or facilities to meet even the
most conservative estimate of the amount needed.
General agreement was evident among the members of the
group that day care qualified for tax support because it is social serv­
ice, primarily a child welfare service and, therefore, should be
supported by a combination of all levels of government. That a need
still existed for the privately supported service was also affirmed since
the private agency has a greater opportunity to undertake experi­
mental and demonstration programs.
38




The group came to the conclusion that communities have a
large stake in day care and concomitantly a huge responsibility for
its support.

Group

10: Community education, coordination and
interpretation (Leader: Miss Martha Jane Brunson, Past
President, Kentucky Division, American Association of Uni­
versity Women)

As a society, we are placing great emphasis on planning.
Sometimes planning for the seeable, such as highways, urban develop­
ment, and the like, comes in for much more acclaim than does social
planning. The tangible and visible are easier to comprehend. This
lends force to the need to do a doubly expert job of social planning.
This group undertook the task of considering the means of arriving
at community education, coordination, and interpretation—the fore­
runner to action on behalf of day-care services.
Miss Brunson opened the subject by expressing the need for
cooperation of everyone throughout a community who was interested
in optimum services to children. Volunteers and professional people
must join forces and close ranks if the goal of adequate day-care services
for all children who need them is to become a reality.
In developing suggestions for effective community education, not
each and every idea will be as effective in one community as in another.
The composite of experiences will provide enough leeway for each
community to decide for itself what it can use and what it cannot.
No other community service can take the place of day-care serv­
ices because the focus is different but, in terms of community atmosphere
and readiness to accept responsibility, others can be used as indicators of
the amount of spadework necessary in planning.
Effective and professional use of all news media is an important
method of community education and must be handled with skill and
aplomb. All kinds of groups which have a history of promoting effective
programs for children should be pressed into service. A workable co­
ordinating group should be formed through which information can flow
and from which dissemination of information can take place.
Workshops held in all parts of the State and bringing together
both workers and laymen are one of the most effective means of gener­
ating interest. Miss Brunson alluded mainly to the "what” of the content
which needed interpretation and left to the group the "how” to do it.
She reiterated the need for qualified staff, the fact that children learn
every day, and that what they learn and how they learn depend on the
adults with whom they are in contact.

In its practicality, this group emerged with a list of concrete




39

things which every community can utilize to some degree. To advance
day care, the community should:
1. Know the facts about day-care needs, purposes, and resources.
Be able to interpret and defend the budget without apology.
2. Make effective use of all news media.
3. Use films about day care with discussion accompanying them.

4. Sponsor "come and see” tours to day-care agencies when appro­
priate and done with propriety and without exploitation of
children.
5. Establish day-care speakers’ bureau with enthusiasts as its core.
6. Relate day-care services to other community interests.
7. Enlist men as well as women in the drive for understanding
and supporting day care.
8. Try to interpret day care to the fund sources in the community.
9. Bring labor and industry into the effort.
10. Use employment services as vital referral agencies.
11. Promote national, State, and local conferences to highlight day­
care services.

12. Inform colleges and universities about community programs.
13. Include day-care services in community directories.

14. Set a "day-care week” or "day” to involve Government officials in
order to educate those with power to act.
15. Have a good public relations service.

Financing day-care services*
Group 11: Ways and means (Leader: Judge Robert W. Landry,
President, Volunteers of America Day Nurseries, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin)
Judge Landry pointed out the most perplexing problem facing
the Nation’s need for day care is the matter of finances. Even in pro♦Two groups (Groups n and 12) were established to discuss Financing Day-Care Services:
Ways and Means.

40




grams which closely approximate optimum conditions, fund raising is a
perpetual problem.
The relatively slow growth of day-care services has caused the
spread between the supply and the need to increase every year.
Our whole economy is pushing upward to provide a higher stand­
ard of living for the American people. Nevertheless, we find ourselves
in the paradoxical position of falling behind in the crucial area of pre­
serving and developing our human resources.
That this Nation cannot afford day care is nonsense. It cannot
afford not to afford it and it can afford what it chooses to afford.
The inescapable conclusion is that we have been unable to sell the
American public on the vital role of day care except on certain levels. If
we have been lagging behind in interpreting our services to the com­
munity, let us pause and examine the structure of the day-care program,
and if new modes of financing are to be developed, it is appropriate that
we look at the day-care program itself.
The operation of a comprehensive day-care program requires the
synthesis of various specialized skills and expert business management.
It is obvious that to maintain the interdisciplinary team required for the
day-care program and to provide them with the necessary working tools,
in addition to a phyical setting as provided for by minimum standards, is
a task that requires considerable effort and determination. The fact that
we have fallen short of our goal in many instances is due to our inability
to provide financial help. There is danger that we may grow accustomed
and overly tolerant of our financial affliction, that we will set lower and
more inadequate goals, that we may attempt to take the easier course of
making do” with what we have instead of facing the challenge that cir­
cumstances have thrust upon us.
It takes intelligence, patience, energy, and determination to over­
come the stagnation of community inertia. Whether the immediate
need is the creation of a totally new day-care program, the refurbishing
of an existing one, or the sound maintenance of a good program, many
hours of expert consultation are required to translate them to the public.
A quality of persistence, if not dogged stubbornness, is a prime requisite
to bring a plan into fruition, and the problem of providing funds is the
most demanding one.
Whether funds be obtained through public support on a broad
basis, such as a United Fund Campaign, or from public funds, such as a
unit of government defraying certain costs, or from agency solicitation
of private citizens, corporations and trusts, there must be a "break­
through” to overcome apathy and disinterest.

To the group, an item of great importance to be placed in large
letters is the fact that parents fees constitute a sizeable contribution.
From one-fourth to two-thirds of the budgets for day-care centers are
met by parents’ fees in some agencies. These are usually scaled ac­
cording to family income and economic situation.
A mother, the sole support of four children working for 50 cents




41

an hour, can hardly be expected to carry the full cost of day care. On
the other hand, many parents do have incomes which preclude the
need for subsidy from any source.
In assessing costs, the sorry picture of the salary scales paid to
day-care workers comes into focus. Public schools pay twice as much
to their teachers with comparably better working conditions. Cooks
in the day-care center realize a pittance compared to similar positions
in other places.
Although day care is recognized as primarily a social service,
yet only a handful of agencies provide social workers for the vital job
of giving family counseling, treatment, or referral service. Few have
access to general health services and psychological consultation, let
alone access to psychiatric treatment when needed. Here again the
preventive factors of these services for children and families in terms
of averting more costly and drastic arrangements later underline their
importance.
The group stood firmly on its belief that good day care can
never be supported entirely by parents’ fees. Like good schools, it
would be impossible to operate without other sources of finance. Both
nonprofit and proprietary centers and family day-care homes need
financial support from other sources.
Practically, the group listed potential sources of funds: Com­
munity Chest or United Funds; local departments of public welfare;
county departments of public welfare; subsidies; purchase of care by
public agencies or by voluntary agencies; National Council of Churches
of Christ in the United States for migrant children; hospital sub­
sidies; church subsidies (money and buildings); fraternal organiza­
tions ; service clubs; foundations; citizens’ groups; public money com­
ing from Federal, State, and local sources.
Having called upon all forces within a community, the group
brought itself up short with the recognition that those already head
over heels in the day-care movement have not fulfilled their responsi­
bility relating to finance. Accurate estimates of costs are not avail­
able—too often goods in kind are not included in budgets—if a build­
ing is donated by some group, no estimate of rent, upkeep, etc., is
included. Where volunteers are used, no inclusion of their worth is
made in the budget. Unless we stop deluding ourselves and the public
and present a true picture of the costs, we deserve to fail.

Group 12: Ways and means (Leader: Miss Betty Knox, Member,
City Council of Hartford, Connecticut)

This group dealt with financial problems but with a somewhat
different approach.
42




Miss Knox assumed that the group shared her concern that com­
prehensive day-care services should be provided in every community.
Then she presented some of the philosophy and facts that must serve as
the cornerstone for the fi nancial structure.
Children in day care who present problems are often those who
carry heavy family problems as their everyday companions. Although
our Nation is committed to keeping families together, yet in sharp con­
tradiction to this is the fact that the stumbling block to doing this is often
the lack of financial resources and the lackadaisical attitude toward pre­
ventive services.
Inadequacy of cost accounting is a primary factor in our inability
to gain financial support for day care.
Questions posed for consideration included: What figure can be
projected on income from fees? This depends on enrollment, on at­
tendance, on sliding scales according to the ability to pay, the neighbor­
hood in which the operating agency functions. If the family need for
day care is not one involving financial need, how high should fees be?
When a child is ill and there are medical expenses and maybe no pay­
check, can we expect a parent to pay to hold a place in the day-care center?
Should this parent be denied the place when once the illness is over and
his need to return to employment is great?

The group declared that a major responsibility of those working
in the field of day care is to be sure that a community is getting its
money’s worth from its day-care expenditure. We need criteria for
doing this. Licensing and consultation exist in most States, suggested
standards are available, but there are no clear-cut policies. Confusion
exists between costs of day-care services and those of nursery schools.
Clearer definition and objectives are essential. Some cities have a
zoning problem related to profit and nonprofit organizations other
than public schools operating in residential areas.
In salaries, we have even less to work with. No salary guides
or personnel practices developed on a national scale for this particular
service exist. Some way, we must devise appropriate national guides
so that the range of costs and fees do not ramble and confuse the issue.
For what children should a community supply day-care serv­
ices? How can we reach the parents who need day care for their
children ? There has been no scientific approach to this. A variety
of devices are at our disposal but not comprehensive enough. An
overexpanded program can fail, and it is expensive to operate below
capacity. Yet we know there is no reason for day-care centers to be
less than bulging if all kinds of needs are met. Accurate methods
for determining need are crucial.
Is there a relationship between identification of day care as a
child welfare service and the sources of support? Some communities
still place day care in the realm of service to families who otherwise




43

would be on public assistance rather than in the total range of child
welfare service.
Can any caseworker be expected to determine need, priority, and
fee if we cannot give her total costs ? Can day care be used as an ad­
junct to the aid to dependent children program and should it? Clearly
the problem of finance is the community’s responsibility, but the com­
munity can be expanded to include the county, State, and Nation.
Particular correlation was seen between the public understand­
ing of day care and financing problems. This was not a new idea but
bears emphasis. The public image of day care is confused as to the
differences between day care and nursery schools, play groups, shop­
ping center babysitting services, bowling alley nurseries, and the like.
This does much to deter a concerted community effort.
Obviously the major element in financing day care lies in public
tax support. However, in coming to this, the question was raised as
to whether or not in seeking such support, confusion of the responsi­
bility to commercial and nonprofit agencies might present difficulties.

The conference ends
The sponsors of the conference—both the Women’s Bureau and
the Children’s Bureau—were conscious of their respective roles in not
only forwarding the achievement of success in acquiring day-care
services for children but in having the conference culminate on a high
note of enthusiasm. This was the hope for the luncheon meeting.
Mrs. Alice K. Leopold, then Director of the Women’s Bureau, De­
partment of Labor, emphasized the deep concern and interest of the De­
partment of Labor in the establishment of adequate day-care services.
The country’s manpower can be utilized to its fullest only when every
child receives the care and guidance that helps him move in the direction
of doing the best he is capable of all his life.
Manpower does not just consist in having or hiring thousands of
workers—it is making the most of our greatest human resources. It is
imperative that we as a society learn how to counsel and guide children
to help them develop to their maximum capacities. This cannot begin
when half their youth is gone. Guidance and counseling must begin with
healthy, happy, well cared for children.
Manpower studies show that a growing number of jobs will re­
quire more and more education and training. This underscores strongly
the need of young people to have an environment that helps them pre­
pare for the world of work ahead. The young child needs to be assured
of security and affection and to be guided in the development of his in­
44



terests and in doing what he is capable of accomplishing. Ideally, this
guidance is provided in a child’s own home, but some circumstances make
it necessary for children to rely on day care. This is why day-care serv­
ices are so important.
No one need make a case for education’s importance to the in­
dividual and to the country but we do need to point up the genuine
tragedy of the youngster who leaves school, who turns his back on op­
portunity. Unless parents and educators, employers and other commu­
nity spokesmen do a better and more convincing job, our manpower fore­
casts show that IV2 million young men and women will start their work­
ing lives in the next 10 years without having graduated from high
school—this at a time when a high school diploma is becoming the mini­
mum requirement for employment in almost every field of work. The
groundwork for the child’s continuing in school may need to be laid in
planning day-care services, including well-manned, carefully run centers
which help parents fulfill their obligations to their children, and in the
final analysis strengthen family life.
Mrs. Leopold voiced the hope that the recommendations which
came from this conference would inspire as well as encourage communi­
ties, organizations, and Government agencies to move ahead to meet the
needs of day care for children.
Arthur S. Flemming, then Secretary of the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, said that manpower may be one of the most
serious problems immediately facing the Nation, because a dearth of
qualified manpower could limit our ability to adjust in a rapidly changing
and complex world. That women will be an increasingly important part
of the labor force is a fact of life in the United States.
Secretary Flemming said he becomes a little impatient with those
who say that we should not put too much emphasis on day-care services
because if we do, we will encourage some mothers to work who do not
need to work. That line of reasoning seems to be indulged in by persons
expressing a willingness to penalize children in order to convince mothers
that they ought to do what others think they ought to do. This just does
not make sense when looked at from any point of view.
The day-care program presents the United States with an unusual
opportunity to make a contribution in the direction of enabling an in­
creasing number of our people to achieve their highest potential.
The need for day-care services is great; indeed, it never has been
greater. The question is, what are we going to do about it as a nation?
The Federal Government in the area of day-care service has an opportunity
for advancing the leadership that will enable the people of this country to
agree on goals and, then, in turn, to agree on what constitutes a fair share
of responsibility for meeting these goals on the part of the Federal, State,
and local governments. In calling this particular conference, the Federal
Government is starting the process of exercising this type of leadership.
The reports from this conference will constitute a move in the direction
of identifying what constitutes a fair share of responsibility at each level.
To take advantage of its opportunity, in the first place, the Federal
Government must become an active partner with State, community, and




45

volunteer groups, Secretary Flemming said. The Federal Government
can do this by providing leadership and identifying national goals; by
providing funds for research and demonstration projects; and by provid­
ing funds to increase the supply of trained personnel required to sustain
high quality day-care services for children.
The Secretary said there wasn’t any question in his mind but that
the Federal Government must increase its appropriations for child wel­
fare services. This would enable the States and communities to do a
better job in this and in other areas. This is also an area wherein the
Federal Government should make available funds for research and demon­
stration projects. He would not say, necessarily, that these funds should
be made available exclusively to the States. This is a situation where the
Federal Government should have funds available and then should allot
those funds on the basis of projects that are presented to it for con­
sideration.
Mrs. Katherine B. Oettinger, Chief of the Children’s Bureau, cited
some of the accomplishments of the conference. It has developed a good
many points of view on what is wrong with day care. Certainly day-care
services have their imperfections, but as we try to improve or remove
those imperfections, or work out needed research plans, we must bend
our efforts to provide what we know is needed. We must not abandon
the principle of day care while we study it.
While we may feel ambivalent about whether mothers should or
should not work, there can be no ambivalence about the need for the care
of children. In the final analysis, each community is always responsible
for the well-being of its citizens, and most particularly its children.
Perhaps the most important contribution this conference has made
is in the explosion of a series of myths. Myth Number 1: More women
will go to work if day-care services are provided for their children. In no
community can we find any evidence that failure to provide day-care
services has resulted in fewer women going to work. What happens is
that women seek more and more second rate alternate choices for care of
their children when these services are absent. This can be paraphrased
by saying that the provision of day-care services no more causes mothers
to work than carrying an umbrella causes rain.
Myth Number 2 consists of considering day-care services as synony­
mous with babysitting or babyparking. Children in day-care services
need the best in professional care, since the deprivation of the full-time
care of their mothers means they need a plus value in every staff person
who touches their lives.
Myth Number 3 says that present professional methods have ob­
tained their highest fruition. Nothing could be more fatal than for
those of a professional group to be complacent about their own abilities.
Social workers, educators, health personnel, and all others involved in the
day-care picture need to keep alive their quest for improved methods of
working with children. We recognize that too many day-care facilities
are not accessible to those who need them and that, at present, day care
fails to meet the needs of many groups of children—not only those of
working mothers but those in overcrowded homes and in situations in
46




which the mother is constantly overworked. We know that many of the
mothers of handicapped, retarded, or emotionally disturbed children feel
inadequate to meet the demands of continuing daily care of their children.
We have also painfully faced the fact at this conference that at the
present time, our day-care standards are in a dangerously uneven stage of
development. Enormous numbers of agencies fail to meet even minimum
standards. Some States have no licensing laws. However, it has been
heartening to hear so many representatives of so many communities say,
"We are at such and such a stage, but we are moving in a systematic pur­
suit of excellence.”
The constantly repeated plea for further research, not just of a
basic nature, but also of demonstration and evaluation, is indeed an en­
lightening approach to some of the problems. We look with enthusiasm
to the studies being undertaken by the Child Welfare League. But while
we pursue greater understanding of our problems through research, we
must continue to serve our children by multiplying our day-care resources
and putting to work that which we already know. Nobody stopped the
use of the iron lung while we sought the answer of the polio vaccine.
And finally we exploded the myth that day-care services are unique
or revolutionary. They are 100 years old in this country. They are
almost always among the first services established in underdeveloped coun­
tries as they face current urbanization. A United Nations International
Children’s Fund study in one of its first areas of welfare concern showed
the beginnings of many different varieties of organized day-care services
throughout the world.
We know that it is true that the need was never greater in the
United States than it is now since the increase in the facilities for day care
has failed so patently to keep pace with the growing numbers of mothers
in the labor market in our expanding economy.
Mrs. Oettinger concluded by saying that while we need fanatics to
keep visible the needs of day care, we leave the conference with the real­
ization that day care is only one part of a mosaic of services for children.
If we allow gaps to exist, the child can stumble and fall through the cracks.
We cannot afford to fail in a country where we acknowledge our respon­
sibility for what happens to our children.




47

nation^

1TTii *: i H-m s
f hr CHILD*1*

RECOMMENDATIONS
The recommendations of the conference have been classified by
the five broad discussion areas. Some of them are consolidated in
order to avoid repetition and to reflect more clearly the emphasis of
the discussion groups.
The conference recommended:
Essential elements in a good community day-care program
1. That day-care services be an integral part of the total range of
child welfare services in every community; that these services be
provided for all children who need them from infancy to adoles­
cence.
2. That the skills of many professions—social work, health, educa­
tion, and others—be utilized in the day-care program.
3. That a comprehensive day-care program should include a variety
of services: family day-care homes, day-care centers, counseling
services.

Varieties of services to meet special day-care needs
4. That communities make a special effort to develop family day­
care services to meet the needs of children under three and of
those older children who cannot adjust to group care.
5. That children with special problems (those with emotional,
physical, or mental handicaps, children in migrant or other
minority groups) have access to day-care services.
6. That the community develop public acceptance of the use of
day-care services for the care of children of employed parents.
7. That day-care services be available to families with special prob­
lems other than the employment of the mother, such as over­
crowded housing conditions, deprived environments, chronic or
48




long-term illness, immature parents, large families with small
children.

Promoting adequate standards
8. That emphasis be placed on the development of more adequate
licensing and consultation services, including guides on mini­
mum and goal standards, the special training of licensing per­
sonnel, recruitment.
9. That standards be the same for all types of day care, public, vol­
untary, and proprietary.
10. That students in health, education, and welfare be given orien­
tation to the field of day care.
11. That every day-care center for young children be supervised by
at least one person qualified in early childhood education.
12. That particular emphasis be placed on the training of personnel
for day-care services for school-age children.
13. That all day-care programs be responsible for providing inserv­
ice training for staff.
14. That statements of standards and goals for personnel include
personality requirements as well as academic training.
15. That salary scales and personnel policies be upgraded to the same
level as comparable services in other fields.
16. That national agencies and communities develop recruitment
programs for day-care personnel.

Promoting community responsibility
17. That research on all aspects of day-care services is a crucial need
and that voluntary, Federal, and State funds be made available
for this purpose.
18. That Federal, State, local, and research agencies develop pro­
cedures for standardizing and reporting operating statistics on
day-care services.
19. That community planning for day-care services should involve
parents, organized labor, industry, business, voluntary and public
agencies, and citizens’ groups.
20. That sound community planning should require continuing and
close cooperation with other agencies in the development and
operation of these services.
21. That each community establish a planned program of community
education and interpretation of day care.




49

22. That a national followup committee be established to promote
the recommendations and implications of this conference.
23. That regional and local day-care conferences of representatives
of public and voluntary organizations be convened to promote
community understanding of day care and to develop methods
for meeting local needs.

Financing day-care services
24. That more effective use be made of existing funds for training
and that additional State and Federal support be made available
through appropriate health, education, and welfare channels.
25. That a concentrated effort be made to obtain local, State, and
Federal funds for establishing a broad range of day-care services
of good quality in every community.

Conference members in their discussion groups arrived at con­
crete and specific recommendations. These not only point the way to
what to do but have much to contribute to make the doing possible.

If to do were as easy as to know what were
good to do, chapels had been churches,
and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.
The Merchant of Venice
Act I, Scene 13

50




CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Thursday, November 17, I960
OPENING SESSION
Presiding
Mrs. Alice K. Leopold
Director, Women’s Bureau
United States Department of Labor

Symposium .... DAY CARE:
A RESPONSE to SOCIAL CHANGE
WOMEN IN THE LABOR FORCE
Dr. Ewan Clague
Commissioner
Bureau of Labor Statistics
United States Department of Labor
CHANGING VALUES IN OUR SOCIETY
Dr. Ethel J. Alpenfels
Professor of Anthropology
School of Education
New York University
WHY DAY CARE?
Mrs. Randolph Guggenheimer
President
National Committee for the Day Care of Children
DAY CARE—AN ESSENTIAL CHILD WELFARE SERVICE
Mr. Joseph H. Reid
Executive Director
Child Welfare League of America

DISCUSSION GROUPS
A. ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS IN A GOOD COMMUNITY PROGRAM
1. Services to preschool children
Mrs. Madeliene Siemann




51

2. Services to school-age children
Dr. W. Mason Mathews
B. VARIETIES OF SERVICES
3. Special needs of children
Miss Esther Middlewood
4. Special needs of employed parents
Julius F. Rothman
5. Special needs of families
Mrs. Leon M. Ginsberg
C. PROMOTING ADEQUATE STANDARDS

6. Licensing and consultation
Malcolm S. Host
7. Personnel and training
Dr. Donald Brieland
D. PROMOTING COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY
8. Factfinding
Dr. Edward E. Schwartz
9. The community’s stake in good day care
Mrs. Virgil Gilmore
10. Community education, coordination and interpretation
Miss Martha Jane Brunson
E. FINANCING DAY CARE SERVICES
11. Ways and means
Judge Robert W. Landry
12. Ways and means
Miss Betty Knox

Film Premiere .... CHILDREN OF CHANGE
Presiding
Mrs. Ruth Grigg Horting
Secretary
Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare
INTRODUCTION OF THE FILM
Mrs. Alberta Jacoby
Executive Director
Mental Health Film Board, Inc.
HOW WE CAN USE THE FILM
Audience
52




HOW CHILDREN’S BUREAU SEES THE FILM’S USE
Mrs. Katherine B. Oettinger
Chief
Children’s Bureau

Friday, November 18, I960
DISCUSSION GROUPS CONTINUED
CONFERENCE LUNCHEON
Presiding
Mrs. Katherine B. Oettinger
Chief
Children’s Bureau




AD HOC COMMITTEE
Miss Elizabeth Bjorling
Associated Day Care Service, Philadelphia
Clark W. Blackburn
Family Service Association of America
Miss Sally Butler
General Federation of Women’s Clubs
Mrs. William J. Cooper
National Cowncil of Jewish Women
Mrs. Edgar Driscoll
West Roxbury, Massachusetts
Dr. Gunnar Dybwad
National Association for Retarded Children
Mrs. Leon M. Ginsberg
Maryland Committee on Group Day Care of Children
Miss Bertel Gordon
Foster Family Day Care Service, New York
Mrs. Randolph Guggenheimer
National Committee for Day Care of Children
Miss Dorothy Guinn
National Cowncil of Negro Women
Miss Fannie Hardy
National Federation of Business and Professional Women's
Chibs
Miss Helen Harris
National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood f!/voters
Miss Christine M. Heinig
American Association of University Women
Mrs. Theresa A. Jackson
Child Welfare League of America
Miss Mary Ruth Lewis
National Council of Catholic Women
Dr. Geoffrey M. Martin
Kansas State Board of Health
54




Miss Edna Mohr
National Association for Nursery Education
Mrs. Alexander Shipman Parr
Association of Junior Leagues of America, Inc.
Mrs. Esther Peterson
AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department
Mrs. Eichard G. Kadue
National Congress of Parents and Teachers
Mrs. Wallace Streeter
United Church Women
Miss Kathryn Warren
Tennessee State Department of Public Welfare
Kenneth I. Williams
United Community Funds and Councils of America
Miss Myrtle P. Wolff
American Public Welfare Association
Lt. Colonel Jane Wrieden
The Salvation Army




U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1962

0—599015

children’s bureau
publication number 393—1961
women’s bureau
bulletin number 281—1961

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE
Social Security Administration
Children’s Bureau
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
Women’s Bureau