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Published by: Little Brown & Co
Release Date: January 1, 1992
Pages: 264
ISBN13: 978-0316783767

 
Synopsis

In this ground-breaking book, Ellen Ruppel Shell takes us deep inside a world that few adults ever penetrate, but where millions of young children spend the bulk of their waking hours.

A Child's Place: A Year in the Life of a Day Care Center is an in-depth look at day care as it really is: a confusing, wonderful, terrifying, messy social experiment. This is an honest, sometimes shocking, consistently fascinating portrayal of day care from the inside, one that both touches the heart and captures the real-life concerns of working parents everywhere.

A Child's Place finds its base at Cambridgeport Children's Center, a multicultural day care center housed in a converted eighteen-car garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The story focuses on the lives of Molly, a teacher with a grown son of her own, and three other families: a newly divorced mother and her son; a professional couple and their daughters; and a Haitian couple and their American-born sons. What these seemingly unlike parents share with each other and with all working parents is an overwhelming drive to do the best for their children despite daunting obstacles. While their stories are very personal, their struggles are universal, and every parent will see at least a partial reflection of his or her own conflicts mirrored in these lives.

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Praise

Shell (journalism, Boston Univ.) here profiles the Cambridgeport Children's Center, a multicultural, community-based day care center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her focus is an experienced teacher named Molly and three representative families: a middle-class family with two daughters, a Haitian immigrant couple with American-born children, and a single mother and her son. The result is a highly readable, deeply informative account of the status of day care in the United States. She assesses the problems, dynamics, emotions, and politics of child care as they are played out on the local, state, and national policy making levels. Around the framework of daily life at the center, the author weaves moving details about family and teacher concerns along with considerable information on the many complex day care issues. Thoroughly researched and gracefully written, this is an important book.
- Hilma F. Cooper, Cheltenham Township Libs., Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Close-up look at Cambridgeport Children's Center, a.k.a. Tot Lot, a community-based, multicultural day-care center in an ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood of Cambridge, Mass. Shell (Journalism/Boston Univ.) creates Tot Lot's portrait by observing and meticulously recording minute details about children, parents, and teachers. Here, she concentrates on three families: a poor Haitian one whose lives are centered on their commitment as Jehovah's Witnesses; a middle-class couple with two careers, two daughters, and a pretty good sense of how to make the system work; and a single working mother and her son. We learn a great deal about their daily lives--what they eat, what they wear, what they do, what they think about--and how they came to be where they are now. Shell provides the same kind of detail about one longtime teacher at the center, rather less about the school's frazzled director, and considerably less about other teachers, who tend to come and go. A high turnover-rate is but one of Tot Lot's problems, for it has teetered on the edge of financial disaster throughout its existence, and there is no assurance that it will survive. Shell tries to place Tot Lot in perspective by including information on the history of child care, differing philosophical approaches to early childhood education, other social agencies concerned with child welfare, and the impact of legislation and budget cuts. Overly detailed but informative--and disturbing in its implications about the economic viability of the day-care system. --
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Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.