Care For Children

MIAMI - A new family has moved into the tan corner house on a well-kept street in the suburb of Kendall, southwest of Miami. Still, neighbors who pass by are more interested in remembering the girl who once lived there. Two years have passed since the girl, Rilya Wilson, disappeared from the house while under the supervision of the state child welfare agency. Her case drew national attention, exposed problems in Florida's child-welfare agency and became an issue in the governor's race last fall.

IT'S THE "Murphy Brown" flap all over again, only this time it is even more off the mark.Somehow the outcry over a need for family values, which reached a fevered pitch during the 1992 presidential campaign, has been resumed. But this time the fingerpointing is not coming from former Vice President Dan Quayle and the culprit is not a fictional television character who became pregnant out of wedlock and decided to have the baby and raise him alone.This time the attacks are being launched by people as politically TC and philosophically diverse as Donna Shalala, President Clinton's secretary of health and human services, and conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.The object of their scorn: "single parents."

As women have surged into Maryland's work force, the state's child care system has struggled to keep pace, leading to a shortage of licensed spaces, and fees that can exceed the cost of a home mortgage.Those are among the findings of a new study by the Maryland Committee for Children Inc., which painted a bleak picture of the state's child care industry."Parents find it very hard to find high-quality day care" said Sandra J. Skolnik, the committee's executive director. "There's a major, desperate need for child care for children under the age 2."

PROVIDENCE -- During World War II, American mothers had to be virtually dragged out of their homes and into the work force. Nowadays, according to sociologist Arlie Hochschild, women have to be dragged out of the office to care for children and the household. The thesis in her controversial book, ''The Time Bind,'' is that many women devote long hours to paying work not out of economic necessity but out of preference.How things have changed. The recent death of the real-life Rosie the Riveter has summoned up that very different era of 55 years ago. ''Rosie the Riveter'' was the name of a hit song that paid tribute to the American women who worked in the nation's defense plants.

Compassion for some, but not othersHow ironic that Wiley Hall's commentary about white poverty being somehow better than black poverty should run on the same day as two articles about the rising cost of teen and adolescent pregnancy.One article reported that expenditures for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid and food stamps had risen 18 percent in three years.Another reported that Maryland had spent $450 million in 1991 -- the amount of its budget shortfall -- on these same programs.

Mary Zaleski, a Rosedale mother who has provided family day care in her home for the last four years, says she wouldn't take care of eight children every day if she didn't care so much about them.Most providers, she says, do their jobs in both a professional and loving manner. That's why, Ms. Zaleski adds, she and others who offer day care in their homes are angry at what they consider over-officiousness and uneven enforcement of regulations by the state Child Care Administration.The agency was created two years ago to make licensing and regulation simpler and more fair.

Inflexible funding extends foster care The column "Maryland's foster kids need help now" (Opinion * Commentary, Feb. 7) made a compelling case for immediate foster care reform. But no state should have to undertake this reform project alone. Instead, the nation needs to modernize the federal-state partnership established a generation ago to serve all abused or neglected children. For instance, as the column made clear, children and families in Maryland and nationwide can benefit from programs such as family counseling, drug treatment and guardianship programs, which help keep families together or limit a child's time in foster care.

WASHINGTON -- Back at medical school, Dr. Barbara Siskind felt the condescending sting of classmates when she embraced children's medicine, a career that has led her to a pediatric practice in Ellicott City. "Oh, you're only going to go into primary care," they sniffed.That attitude remains a dubious hallmark of the U.S. health care system, unique in the world for having twice as many specialists as primary care doctors -- the internists, family physicians and pediatricians who work on medicine's front lines but are at the back of the pack in pay and glamor.

LONDON -- They took Frank Beck away Nov. 29 to spend the rest of his natural life in prison.And as they did, it was at least evident that things are not all that much better for children in institutions and orphanages throughout Britain today than in the days of Charles Dickens, who tried to make the world aware of what went on in those places by creating characters such as the poor, abused Oliver Twist.Beck ran public homes for troubled and orphaned children in Leicester. He was charged with and convicted of abusing the children in his care for more than 13 years.

Mary Zaleski, a Rosedale mother who has provided family day care in her home for the last four years, says she wouldn't take care of eight children every day if she didn't care so much about them.Most providers, she says, do their jobs in both a professional and loving manner. That's why, Ms. Zaleski adds, she and others who offer day care in their homes are angry at what they consider over-officiousness and uneven enforcement of regulations by the state Child Care Administration.The agency was created two years ago to make licensing and regulation simpler and more fair.