Child-Care Centers on College Campuses
Wednesday, February 23, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time
In the last year, national studies have shown that female professors who have children are much less likely to succeed in academe than are men with families. Another study of faculty members at major research universities has shown that women in general are much less satisfied with their jobs than are men.
Some universities have decided that building on-campus day-care centers is one answer. The centers, which typically have flexible hours and are very convenient for professors, are also being used to recruit faculty members. Child-care services are just one of several benefits typically managed by university offices of work and family, which have sprouted up in the last couple of decades as more and more women have joined the faculty ranks.
How popular are child-care centers on campuses, and do they work for all faculty members? Most important, how far do they go in solving professors' work-family problems? What other work-family benefits could or should universities offer, and how effective can they be? Would a university's child-care services be a major factor in your decision to seek a job there? Are such services a fair benefit, given that not all faculty members have children?
» Keeping Kids Close (2/25/2005)
Kathy L. Simons is co-director of the Center for Work, Family, and Personal Life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which last summer opened a new, state-of-the-art child-care center. She has managed MIT's child-care programs and counseled professors on work/life issues at MIT for nearly 20 years. She is also a co-founder of the College and University Work/Family Association.
Robin Wilson (Moderator):
I'm Robin Wilson and I cover work/life issues for the Faculty Section of The Chronicle. I want to thank Kathy Simons, from MIT, for being with us here today. I know that the annual conference of the College and University Work/Family Association, which you co-founded, starts tomorrow and so I appreciate your taking the time to answer our questions today.
Kathy L. Simons:
Thank you, Robin, it's a pleasure to be here.
Robin Wilson (Moderator):
Ok, now let's start with the questions.
Question from Venitha Pillay, University of Pretoria:
Do academic mothers think better when their children are close at hand or when there is physical separation during working hours.
Kathy L. Simons:
I typically hear from mothers (and fathers) that they want their children, particularly their infants and young children, to be physically separate (out of sight) but very close by, with a trusted, quality caregiver.
An on-site child care program (for example)offers parents the comfort and convenience of proximity: knowing you can be there very quickly if there is a problem, or can visit frequently in order to continue to breastfeed; knowing you don't have to fight uncertain traffic to arrive on time for pick-up at the end of the day. On-site care also offers parents a sense of sharing a community, a social world, with their child; I know that parents often find it very rich to bring their child to their work place, with children of colleagues and associates. And when care is nearby, parents can and do drop by to visit and are more likely to participate in an organized parent event.
Proximity helps a parent separate comfortably and focus on work, but bottom-line, in order for this to happen, a parent must feel trust in the quality of care, and have a sense that the child has made attachments to the caregivers in the new environment, is cared for, and is happy.
Question from Sarah Goodwin, Skidmore, liberal arts college:
Skidmore has had the Greenberg Child Care Center, a first-rate facility that has transformed our campus, for almost 20 years. Questions: what do other campuses and/or centers do to help parents who need temporary care for a sick child? And what have other small colleges done when the campus child-care center is too small to accommodate the burgeoning need?
Kathy L. Simons:
Good questions. There are a number of options to help parents with temporary care, including care for a sick child, care when regular child care arrangements break down, or care during school vacations or early release days, etc. The most readily available and accepted approaches for sick child care include flexible work policies that allow parents to shift works hours and/or work from home, and in-home child care referral services. Parents may combine these two approaches -- for example, call the sitter service to get help with the morning when the parent needs to be on campus to teach or attend a crtiical meeting, and then take work home for the afternoon.
A number of colleges contract with vendors to provide referrals on short notice to screened in-home care providers, and some off-set the cost of the registration or daily fees to encourage utilization across income groups. Some vendors offer elder care-givers as well as child care-givers, addressing a wider scope of work/life needs. Other options, more common for well-child back-up care, include reserving or purchasing back-up slots in an ongoing center for short-term use; purchasing back-up slots in a specially designed back-up child care facility; establishing a relationship with a network of family child care providers for short-term care in licensed homes; developing campus babysitter services; and developing on-site vacation or snow-day programs operated by the college or by an outside vendor.
Regarding the second question -- when the campus center is too small to meet the need -- there is a series of questions to be asked to help decide whether it makes sense for the college to respond to the increased need, and if so, whether alone or in partnership with another employer or group, or through a community partnership that works to expand the supply of community-based child care. If the college feels it makes sense to expand its own management of child care, the questions are then about "how": options include expanding the current on-site program by building a larger facility or by adding a second site, purchasing slots in a community-based program, or purchasing "priority" enrollment for campus employees and students in a child care center or for-profit child care organization.
Question from Dana, state university:
I am a faculty member at a state university with aproximately 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students and approximately 950 full-time faculty. We currently do not have a full-time child-care center on campus, but we are exploring this possibility. Thus, we are looking for models of successful on-site child-care centers at similar sized colleges and universities. We have already discovered a few of these programs, but we are looking for other models. Do you have any suggestions?
Kathy L. Simons:
Dana, there are two organizations that are exceptionally helpful with respect to making connections with peer institutions around child care and work/life issues: the College and University Work/Family Association, www.cuwfa.org, and the National Coalition for Campus Children's Centers, www.campuschildren.org. Both offer listservs that will enable you to query the memberships regarding issues specific to you; listserv discussions are archived and searchable. CUWFA is a group I helped co-found, covering all aspects of work/life on campus. The CUWFA conference is extremely useful for gathering information, resources, and networking, and with funding from Sloan, has been able to offer a special conference track on faculty issues for several years.
Question from Susan Brown, Miami University:
Are you aware of any programs extending help with family/work issues to professional staff members?
Kathy L. Simons:
Susan, our work/life program at MIT, the Center for Work, Family and Personal Life, serves faculty, staff and students. We provide direct services in the areas of parenting, child care, education, and job flexibility, through seminars, individual consultations, referrals, groups, a lending library, web resources, program listings and information packets. We also engage in research and policy development, including on topics that are of specific concern to professional staff.
Actually, the majority of contacts I've made with work/life professionals at other colleges and universities serve the entire campus community,as we do here, although others focus primarily on faculty or student issues.
There are certainly benefits to our serving the entire MIT community -- so many of these issues cut broadly,and intersect, and our efforts can contribute to strengthening the sense of campus community.
Question from Venitha Pillay, University of Pretoria:
When children have to attend formal school, do mothers find this a relief in terms of their own work life, or is this a cause for greater concern for them?
Kathy L. Simons:
I think of the term formal school as referring to elementary/grade school -- is this right? In any case, I find that as children grow older, some concerns abate and new ones arise. Generally, parents find the separation easier as children grow older, and become more adept at locating and using resources. Parents may also find they have greater energy for their own work as some of the intense demands of early childhood lessen -- children are ill less frequently, parents get more sleep, etc.
However, formal schools are generally less supportive of working parents and less focused on children's social and emotional needs, which can add to parents' logistical problems and intensify work/family conflicts. The challenges of the early years are more straightforward: find good, high quality child care, and one program might be a year-round solution for four or more years. Later, children need separate arrangement for school, after-school, activities programs, summer programs -- and interests and needs change more frequently. The logistics are much more demanding, and the resources are less well-developed, less integrated, and less family-friendly.
Question from Gavin Moodie, Griffith University, a middle ranking doctoral university in Australia:
Is the fundamental problem that men do not do their share of child rearing (not just minding) and house work?
Kathy L. Simons:
No, I don't think so. I believe the fundamental problems are economic and political, as well as social. The context of the problem is that the number of combined hours spent working in the home, providing child care, and working outside the home has increased significantly for both women and men; while men are assuming more of an equal share of that burden (a different problem), families still need additional social supports. Families find they need all available adults in the work force in order to meet income needs, just as the demands of paid employment have increased, including longer work hours.
Thus, families need child care but the cost is unaffordable for many. The affordability problem has generated problems with child care availability and quality as well, since salaries for early child caregivers are so low that there are serious problems with labor supply, and public and private resources for child care are so limited it's challenging to find appropriate spaces to locate child care programs. I believe the problem requires a political solution: we need to invest in child care in order that our children and families survive and thrive.
Question from Asst Prof. Small Liberal Arts College:
I have heard that some colleges don't offer childcare because of the liability. Is that a big problem? Would the benefits definitely outweigh the liabilities?
Kathy L. Simons:
I observe that colleges and universities are very experienced with liability issues, given the business they are in and activities they sponsor! (housing, athletics, here at MIT, a nuclear reactor on site...) This is useful, because clearly there are ways to manage liability issues in child care as there are in other domains. Some employers prefer to partner with an outside vendor in order to share some aspsects of liability, including having an experienced vendor oversee program quality, key to managing liability concerns. I think that colleges will make a decision regarding whether child care is central enough to their interests to take on the liability issues, and if it is, can find ways to manage the liability as they do other liability concerns -- quality control, professional standards, insurance coverage, etc. etc.
Question from Lynette Chappell-Williams, Cornell University:
For those universities with on site care, are their "nontraditional" hours to accommodate the scheduling needs of faculty? For example, are they open in the evenings and on weekends and do they allow participants to use time increments (2 hours, 4 hours, etc) rather than full day?
Kathy L. Simons:
It really varies campus to campus, although I observe that extended hours programs, offering evening or early morning or weekend care, seem to get less use than they anticipate in the planning stage. A lot of campus programs seem to offer part-time hours, as we do. This is much easier to do, from a program management perspective, than nontraditional hours. However, a very short stay -- two-hours -- is more difficult to manage than a half-day or three-quarter day. Two challenges: maintaining some continuity for children re: peer group, activities, etc., and maintaining enrollment at or near the maximum in order to keep down costs. It seems that the needs of children in very part-time programs, or drop-in programs, are quite different from those of children in full-time or near full-time, ongoing programs, and it may make sense to separate these in programs designed to meet the needs of each group.
Question from Robin Wilson:
Ms. Simons, Mit opened a beautiful, state-of-the-art child-care center last year. Can you tell me: What kind of child-care facilities did MIT have in place on its main campus before the new center was opened, and what forces conspired to persuade MIT officials to put so much time, money, and thought into the new center? This might be helpful for people lobbying for a child-care center on their own campuses.
Kathy L. Simons:
MIT's new Stata child care center did indeed benefit from its location in a major new building on campus, and a design process that lasted four years. We had an opportunity to explore many aspects of child care center design, and to think about the special characteristics of our campus community -- how could the space really support what goes on at the center? We already knew a lot from our experience with our existing centers -- MIT has had two relatively small centers on campus since the 1970's (part-day nursery school since the 1950's), and a third center at our research facility, Lincoln Laboratory, about ten miles from campus. What forces conspired to persuade MIT to do more? We had a number of committees looking at child care needs, including most critically a number of ad hoc faculty groups, plus a number of employee surveys recommending that MIT expand its child care programs. Eventually these forces converged with a major building expansion program, and a period of intense activity re: faculty recruitment, and our Provost championed the cause of child care in one of the buildings.
Question from Kristie Nix, University of Tulsa:
A comment: While serving on male-dominated committees which often would last significantly past 5PM (when my other full-time job of picking up and caring for my family started) I'd look at the time-insensitive men and think, "So who is picking up your children and fixing your dinner?" Heaven forbid that I might point it out that my precious children needed their mommy and dinner, lest I appear undedicated to the aims of academe.
Kathy L. Simons:
I hear this from women, and some men, as well. These issues need to be addressed generally rather than individually, at the program or department level, or higher up at the level of a Committee on Family and Work. There's a lot on the line for colleges, and these issues would seem to be address-able.
Question from Joan, community college in NJ:
Aren't we missing the point here? If we look at women academics with or without children, the results are the same: lower opportunities. Do you agree? Though not wishing to throw out the baby with the bath water, is motherhood the real cause of discrimination towards women in academe - or is it the fact of gender alone?
Kathy L. Simons:
Motherhood does seem to compound the issues for women, and we are seeing that fatherhood compounds these issues for men.
Question from Christine Brenner, Rutgers University:
It isn't only young professors who have work-family balance issues. As our families age issues related to aging parents, difficulties with teenagers, problems of substance abuse by a family member can pull female faculty as primary caregivers in many directions. It would be helpful to hold informational talks for faculty of this aspect of our personal lives. Are you aware of any universities offering this type of support for faculty?
Kathy L. Simons:
Christine, yes, we do, and many of my colleagues do as well - those that don't yet are probably planning to. The Center for Work, Family and Personal Life offers seminars and groups addressing aging and elder care issues, and we have an internal consultant/referral source for families dealing with elder care issues. This is certainly a growing need.
Question from Jane Juffer, Penn State University:
Do you know of any universities that address the specific needs of single parents? As a single mom, I am sometimes frustated by the assumptions in most policy recommendations that there are two parents at home.
Kathy L. Simons:
At MIT we do consider the needs of single parents in a number of ways, for example, there is an extensive child care scholarship program to help with affordability, there are seminars and support groups for single parents, consultations and a lending library on these issues as well. It is important for universities to keep in mind the full diversity of family structures, which we believe enriches the community.
Question from Saranna Thornton, Hampden-Sydney College:
I have four children. When I had day care on campus, it was a huge help in balancing work with breastfeeding. But to be useful, on-site day care has to be affordable. Some universities's day care centers charge fees that are only affordable for highly paid faculty or staff.
Moreover, while on-site day care is a great benefit, the big problem is that tenure line jobs require what Joan Williams terms, "ideal workers" => faculty who have little or no responsibilities for home and/or children. Making the tenure bar so high that faculty have to work 60-80 hours a week really isn't a business necessity. Our knowledge base won't be terribly diminished if scholars publish a few less articles or one less book over their 30-40 year careers.
What are college and university senior faculty and administrators going to do to make the work of tenure line jobs compatible with parenting?
Kathy L. Simons:
Yes, child care must be affordable to help families, and it is generally very expensive on campus as elsewhere. Since it is expensive to offer, it is likely to require subsidy from the university, as most states offer very limited subsidy to families. At MIT, roughly a third of the families enrolled in our campus child care programs receive some level of scholarship, often very substantial.
MIT, like a number of universities, is looking at the issue of the tenure clock, and pace-and-pressure issues. For more information on MIT's discussions and new policies for family care for faculty members, including parental leave, tenure-clock stoppage, and part-time positions, check these web sites: web.mit.edu/facfamily/ and web.mit.edu/workfamily
Question from J., University of Colorado:
I have been asking our department to set aside a small room to accommodate the children of the members of our department for no school days or brief visits. I am being told that there are too many legal issues associated with it. Do you know of any place that has such a set-up, and what do we need to do to establish one?
Kathy L. Simons:
I believe that the University of Oregon had, or perhaps still has, such a space set up for student use -- I can offer a contact there, should you wish. You might also check with the COllege and University Work/Family Association (www.cuwfa.org/). More often, I hear about on-site programs run by the university or by outside vendor offering professional, supervised care on special days like snow days - clearly these provide greater comfort and quality assurance.
Question from Assistant Professor at Large State School:
We have a small day care center on campus, but the spots seem to go to "big stars" or major players who come to campus, and negotiate a spot for their children as part of their start-up or contract. How can we help the administration to understand that their ordinary faculty and staff, and not just the superstars, benefit from on-site child care? And how do we begin to help the higher-ups know that we need a much larger facility, with enough room for the children of ordinary university citizens.
Kathy L. Simons:
Although our programs have always been diverse, what has worked here to keep it that way has been ongoing committee work, survey results, and dialogue involving support staff groups, administrative staff groups, junior and senior faculty groups, student and postdoc groups, regarding the need for child care support. It takes time, and signficant effort, to generate enough momentum.
Robin Wilson (Moderator):
Well, our time is up for today. Thanks to our readers for sending in such thoughtful questions. And to Ms. Simons for answering them.
Question from Robin Wilson:
Kathy L. Simons:
Thanks again, Robin, for the opportunity to enage in this interesting exchange -- these issues are so important, and it's exciting that there is so much discussion on campuses. If anyone would like to get in touch with me, you can contact me at: ksimons@mit.edu.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education