In the morning I sweep up my small and precious children in my arms. My daughter whines about wanting to bring her Little Pony in to class for the 15,000th time. The baby burps Cream of Wheat on my wool jacket, his shoes already half off, and gives me that knowing smile. Mommy, you're late. Who you gonna shortchange today? Me? Sister? Or da boss?

It is 7:45 a.m. My hope of getting a parking place within a half-mile of my office vanishes with the dew. After the children are settled, with the usual kiss and a wave, I head out, fighting the urge to linger.

"We're obsessed," says Linda Blum, flatly. "As a culture we're fixated on the notion of the 'privileged mother' or the woman who has the luxury to choose whether to work or not, and the 'morality' of this decision." Blum, an assistant professor of sociology, has spent years researching different aspects of modern women's lives. She tells me that this obsession has created the fear that drives women into "supermom" roles, seeking to distance themselves from the "bad mother" and creating anxiety about their ability to become a "good mother." But there is no consensus on what a good mother is—whether it's the strictly stay-at-home version or one who achieves a perfect balance between children, marriage and career. Thus the load of guilt that employed mothers like me carry and the doubt that plagues my stay-at-home parent friends shadows us no matter what choice we make.

"Our government says the responsibility for creating good children rests with the individual, not the state," says Blum, echoing other researchers. "Middle-class and above children are considered neglected if their mother isn't home raising them. Conversely, mothers of children at the bottom of the economic ladder are expected to work for pay, as shown by the ending of welfare. What we lack in our country is any real sense of choice in child-rearing options."

In 1965, 25 percent of mothers with children under six years of age worked outside the home; today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, 65 percent do so. And thanks to skyrocketing divorce rates, about half of the children born in the 1990s can expect to spend at least five years of their childhood in a single-parent family.

Most American mothers who return to the office do so in their child's first three to five months of life, and their children spend much of their early lives with a variety of caregivers. I was lucky. My bosses let me cobble together paid and unpaid leave that gave me four and five months off with each child. My friends in the corporate world normally receive eight paid weeks off. The government mandates even less—12 weeks of unpaid leave for workers at businesses with more than 50 employees. Nor do fathers fare any better. Only 1 percent of corporations offer paternity leave and few fathers take advantage of it, fearing that caring for children would signal a lack of professional commitment. One UNH researcher I spoke to said she tried for three years to study "daddy-track" fathers in Alabama who either stayed home with their children or took a part-time job to spend more time with them. She had to abandon the study because she was only able to locate two such fathers.

"We don't even dream of the kinds of parent-friendly legislation that exists in other industrial nations, like Scandinavia," says Blum, "where either parent can take a year's paid leave after the birth of a child or work part-time for the child's first eight years."

Nationwide concerns about the quality and availability of day care are on the rise. Seventy percent of respondents in a recent survey of parents with children under six by the Children's Defense Fund said they found it extremely difficult to find affordable, quality day care. Translated to legislators, this concern has spurred an unprecedented flurry of state and federal initiatives, including recent proposals to give tax breaks to businesses who help their employees with day care and to extend federal day-care subsidies to more families. Some conservative lawmakers are even countering with proposals to give small tax breaks to families who would keep one parent home with the children.

Despite all the public concern about day care, the situation is not improving. "Child care in our country is becoming more and more uneven," says Michael Kalinowski, associate professor of family studies and former director of the UNH Child Study and Development Center, who has observed child care at more than 400 facilities. "While huge advances in child care have been realized in Europe and even in some third-world countries, child care in the United States has actually gotten worse."

Early childhood care and education should be the most sophisticated of all because the youngest children have the greatest needs. Yet Kalinowski notes parents often can't afford the cost of that care. In France, for example, early childhood workers are paid by the government, with local communities paying for the facilities. These workers have paid benefits and paid leave as well as standing in the community. Our early child care workers, on the other hand, subsidize the cost of child care with their low salaries, often out of a sense of commitment to children. Eventually the low pay and lack of benefits result in caregiver burnout and high staff turnover--a disaster for children.

Low pay and staff burnout, Kalinowski says, has led to a desperate shortage of high-quality child care. Many parents, he says, will take anything they can find, for lack of better alternatives. The two other major considerations beyond that are expense and location. Often parents piece together child-care arrangements and simply hope for the best. He suggests that luck then plays a huge role in the quality of care many children, even infants, receive.

One solution, Kalinowski recommends, is that parents start earlier in their search for child care and carefully evaluate how they will feel about leaving their children with these caregivers.

"Safety is important," he says, "but you also need to consider how caregivers will contribute to your child's care. Are they sensitive to children? Do they respond to their questions? Do they provide a stimulating environment? What is your gut level of trust?"

Quality is Key

My children attend UNH's Child Study and Development Center (in our house we call it "Buddies"). Buddies has a reputation for being among the best, and if the happy parents I see there are any testimony, it deserves its reputation. I know my children's teachers love them, and my children are delighted to be there. These insights alleviate my guilt only fractionally.

Although intellectually I know my children are fine, in my core doubt still whispers: I am weak. I am a bad mother. I would rather slink off to my calm, grown-up office than nurture the two people I love most in the world. Because no matter that day care costs more than my mortgage, no matter that I have quit every other activity outside my home life, that I spend every weekend and evening with my children, it never, ever seems to be enough. I read articles about women professionals who quit their incredible jobs, move to smaller houses and raise their babies themselves. Society's condemnation of employed mothers cuts me. My children would never be so judgmental. Or would they?

In a society where two-thirds of the mothers work outside the home, is it possible that our response to day care will eventually shift from wrangling over whether it's right or wrong to simple acceptance? The two-parent, one wage-earning family isn't likely to reappear, and rather than lamenting our cultural loss, how can we shift our focus to make the best of it?

"To begin with, whether children are raised at home or in a care situation, more emphasis needs to be placed on the quality of that care versus who's giving it," says Kathleen McCartney, professor of psychology and director of the Child Study Development Center (CSDC). McCartney is one of the principal investigators in the largest child-care study ever undertaken in the United States, funded through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Over the course of the last seven years, McCartney and her colleagues have studied more than 1,350 families in nine states all born within the same 24-hour time period. The results have provided a snapshot on the evolving face of childhood in our culture.

I broach the question to her as impassively as possible. "Is child care outside the home the risk factor it was once considered to be?"

"Not usually," says McCartney. "For example, we have very good evidence that child care, even 40 hours a week, when it's good, poses no risk to children. When we do see an effect, the results are positive; but, again, this depends on the kind of care. We've learned that quality matters: good-quality child care fosters language and cognitive development as well as better peer relations and socialization."

Says McCartney, "We now know that we're not putting children at risk unless we put them in low-quality care, and in fact, the research shows the greater risk to children is having insensitive or depressed parents. Family variables are much more predictive of children's outcomes than child-care variables."

According to McCartney, parents should look first for sensitive caregivers, preferably with fewer children to care for (a low child-to-caregiver ratio helps ensure sensitive care). Then the more education the caregiver has the better, even if it's not in child development (although McCartney says research has shown that's the best option). "Toys and physical facilities are not that important," says McCartney. "I've been in centers where they're lucky to have construction paper, but the child-care teachers are providing sensitive and responsive care, and they're planning developmentally appropriate activities to meet the children's needs."

A Cultural Divide

Last March I met Chiara Bove, an Italian researcher studying infant-mother transitions into day care. Curious, I ask her one day how her research is going, if she is noticing any differences between American and Italian mothers.

I wince at her description, recognizing myself in the hurried mothers rushing, always in a rush. I wonder how Italians take off Band-Aids. Is it a slow, languid easing of the adhesive, or do they yank them in one tug, as Americans do, to make the pain as brief as possible? Probably no one has done research on that. But that is my allegory for day care. A place where every morning you rip the Band-Aid off and every evening, you carefully reapply it.

"I think W.C. Fields was right," says Kalinowski, "Americans love childhood but not children. We use that as an excuse to absolve ourselves collectively of our child-care dilemmas."

"For example," he continues, "in our culture we have always felt that children are the province of the family—the overriding interest has been one of the private relationship between parents and children. Other cultures view children as a public responsibility and as a community interest. In our culture, if the child is a latchkey child, home alone for whatever reason, that's 'the family's fault.'"

If the concept of shared day care in our country is so problematic, where should we look for a more healthy tradition?

"Italy is one place to start," suggests Rebecca New, associate professor of early childhood education. Her research for the past two decades has been conducted in diverse communities in Italy, where the care and education of young children is considered both a familial and a social responsibility. Much of her more recent work has focused on cities (such as Reggio Emilia, Parma, San Miniato, and Milano) with reputations for high-quality early childhood programs.

"The concept of day care in Italy is not simply, send mothers to work and children to day care. The centers do not exist in a vacuum, with parents' jobs in one universe and children's care in another," says New. "Caregivers of young children in Italy typically see their roles as sharing the child's care with the parents. The dialogue between caregivers and parents is especially rich. Parental concerns that the child will grow to love another person are discussed routinely as parents and teachers develop relationships of mutual trust and respect. As the children develop effective relationships with other adults and children in the care-giving environment, parents and teachers also grow in their understanding of their respective contributions to the child's development. Children's well-being is thus regarded as both the shared responsibility and the pleasure of the larger community."

Before initiating her research in Italy, New also participated in a Boston-based study of infant care in the late 1970s. Although the findings are now several decades old, some of the issues remain current. For example, when New interviewed mothers in Boston, she tells me the predominant emotion they expressed was guilt. Another was loneliness: American mothers said they often felt as though they were on their own. Employed and stay-at-home mothers both indicated that they felt inadequate and lacked what they regarded as necessary parenting skills, including a sense of humor and lots of patience. And few mothers seemed aware of potential sources of support for their parental roles other than the child's father or, in some cases, neighbors or family members.

A Call to Action

It doesn't have to be this way for families in the United States. At some point employers and the government must recognize the social and economic benefits of quality day care and respond with support for increased funding and training for child-care workers.

"Some of my students come back after graduating and are frustrated with their profession," says Kerry Kazura, assistant professor of family studies. "Though many become directors of child-care centers, during their initial job searches some graduates find it difficult to locate high-quality child-care positions." Kazura says this illustrates that day-care funding is a critical issue. "If you want to increase the quality you have to increase care providers' pay," Kazura says. "If parents ask me how to find good day care, I say, you need to understand that quality providers are more expensive and worth every penny."

The price for not increasing the quality of day care, Kazura maintains, is children who fall behind at school time. "Children in poor-quality day care aren't prepared when they go into school. If you look at test scores for children in the United States versus Japan, where early education is highly valued, you see a big gap. We have the potential to turn that around by supporting day care." And Kazura believes we have many good reasons to do so in addition to ensuring academic readiness. "We've seen that good-quality day care supports the emotional and social development of young children. Those in good situations learn how to form peer relationships at a younger age and receive more stimulation than children with less diverse experiences. And we know that to a point, the more diverse, high-quality stimulation children receive, the better."

Susan Warner Smith is a writer and editor for University Publications at the University of New Hampshire.