BETHALTO, Ill. — To the parents of this sleepy burg who entrusted their children to Debbie Rees, the months since she was taken from her home in handcuffs have been a slow awakening from a dream into a stone-cold morning of reality.
The dream started wonderfully. Here was an energetic young woman licensed by the state of Illinois to look after six lucky children in her immaculate, upscale home--for $70 a week each, tops.
That was before last Aug. 27, when an infant girl in Rees' care was bitten 20 times by an older child with whom she shared her playpen. When the law swooped down the next day, a state worker found three children under the age of 4 in a closed bedroom closet--two sleeping face down on the carpet and a panicked 10-month-old howling to get out. Eight preschoolers were playing unsupervised in a fenced-in backyard.
Only now, as Rees moves to trial today in nearby Edwardsville on 16 charges of child endangerment, are the scales finally falling from the eyes of Bethalto's parents. And for most in this semi-rural St. Louis suburb, it's the waking that has been the real nightmare.
They trusted Debora Rees, 34, to provide their children a cozy home-away-from-home. How, they are asking now, could they have failed to see signs that it wasn't so?
"You really want to believe," said a distraught David Wiegand, whose sweet-tempered 2-year-old with Down's syndrome spent seven months at the Rees family day care. "You turn your kid over to someone and rely on her to take care of him. We thought we did a really good job of picking a day care."
That, said child-care expert Ellen Galinsky, is the "parental paradox."
Working mothers and fathers love their children as deeply as other parents do, and they want the very best for them. The vast majority think they have found it in their child-care arrangements.
But, child development experts say, most day care ranges from mediocre to miserable.
In a 1995 study, academic researchers judging the quality of day care in four states, including California, classified 86% of those they visited as less than "good," with about three-quarters ranking in the mediocre category and 12% providing "less than minimal" care. Among those serving the youngest children, about 40% landed in the bottom category because of safety problems, poor sanitation practices, unresponsive caregivers and an absence of toys and other stimulating materials.
Painful as it may be to face--and many will not--working parents may be exposing their children to possible injury, illness, stunted intellectual growth and emotional and social impairment.
Galinsky, of the New York-based Families and Work Institute, said many parents in search of day care take on faith the judgments of friends and family and neglect to ask tough questions of their own. Seeking low cost and convenience, they sometimes unwittingly sacrifice quality.
As many as three parents in four believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have no satisfactory alternatives to the child-care arrangements they choose, according to a survey by Galinsky's institute. And many fear that any alternative would be higher in cost or lower in quality, or both.
In the end, said Galinsky, parents want to believe. They need to believe, she added, because their self-esteem as parents is on the line.
Said Pam Monetti, a mother who followed her sister's lead and brought her son to Rees: "It's easy, it's convenient, it's on your schedule. You don't want to rock the boat, so you close your eyes and ears and don't want to think about it. . . .
"How could we have put our kid here and trusted her? What kind of parents does that make us?"
It makes us, say Galinsky and other experts, the kinds of parents who need consumer education about choosing child care. Even the strongest regulation and enforcement of child-care standards, say experts, will not work if parents do not recognize when things are amiss.
Across the country, license violations like those alleged at the Rees family day-care center are legion. No one compiles nationwide data, but a search of press coverage suggests at least dozens of cases a year.
The Rees case and similar ones around the country show that parents often feel such a deep investment in their child-care providers that they cannot acknowledge the truth, even when their children's well-being is at stake. Kris Russell, a 36-year-old mother of two in Plano, Texas, knows all too well about turning a blind eye to her children's day care. Last June, she picked up her son, now almost 3, and 1-year-old daughter, Emma, at the handsome day-care home her family had used for 18 months. Emma had been sick and vomiting for weeks, and Russell reluctantly took her to an emergency room when she seemed to have trouble standing.
There she got harrowing news: Doctors told her that Emma appeared to have been held upside down and shaken violently. Both of her legs had been broken, her skull had been fractured and she had serious bleeding in her brain.
