031274 dn One working mother who cares

By PAULA BERNSTEIN

Every working mother knows it.

"One of the most terrific day care problems is the idea that once a child is in school, there are no more problems," Says Margaret O'Brien Steinfels. "After school sitters is one of the most ignored needs today."

To solve her own sitting problems, Mrs. Steinfels, a reverse commuter from Manhattan to Westchester, still maintains the same reciprocal arrangements with friends she did when Gabrielle, 8, and John-Melville, 5, were in nursery school.

Mrs. Steinfels is managing editor for The Hastings Center Report of the Institute for Society, Ethics and Life Sciences in Hastings, Westchester, and tries to be home by mid afternoon. Like many mothers, she hopes someday that schools or local communities will offer sports and recreational programs at schools, after classes.

Abandoned efforts

Several years ago, Mrs. Steinfels and her upper West Side neighbors tried to start a community day care center several years ago. They abandoned their efforts after New York State failed to put the bond issue for building day care facilities on the ballot.

At that time, Mrs. Steinfels was studying for a master's degree in American history
at New York University, and was deep into research about 18th-century Irish immigrant families.

She combined her interests as a scholar,community activist and mother and put them in "Who's Minding the Children?" a Simon & Schuster book about the history and politics of day care in America.

The obvious, but depressing, answer to her book's title is that nobody's minding a lot of the children. There are six million pre-schoolers in the U.S. today with working mothers, but room for only 700,000 of them in day care facilities.

"Day care is a necessity," -believes Mrs. Steinfels. "Since World War II the number of working mothers of young children has grown, even though there has been a minimal amount of quality day care available. Those numbers will continue to grow whether or not there is good day care."

"Day care is a political question," believes Mrs. Steinfels. In the narrower sense proposing legislation, forming coalitions, lobbying, voting, funding, and sparring with bureaucrats. And in he larger sense-the process by which a society shapes its values and balances its interest, decides how it shall live, what it is."

She thinks child rearing should be shared by mothers and fathers "so that careers can be paced according to stages in family life, and so that children and families become major concerns of the world beyond the household."