Time to Care: Redesigning Child Care to Promote Education, Support Families, and Build Communities

Book Description
In this important work, Joan Lombardi, one of Americas foremost experts on child care, shows how our current system is not meeting the needs of America's families and describes a vision for redesigning this system to promote healthy child and youth development. Both as an expert and as a parent, the author guides the reader through the problems that face the current child care system and outlines the possible solutions. Drawing on the most recent innovations from across the country, she offers fresh ideas for improving the quality and availability of child care, both for young children and those in after school programs. From renewal of welfare reform to the administration's efforts to promote literacy, debate at both the state and federal levels about child care will continue for the foreseeable future. Joan Lombardi shows how to bridge the gap between early education and child care by taking advantage of the hours that children spend in care to encourage child and youth development and by creating a system of program and community supports to improve quality.

From the Publisher
A blue print for improving child care in America

From the Inside Flap
"Time to Care is the ideal 'go-to' book in child care. It has everything—an historical perspective, a review of demographics and research, an insightful policy perspective, promising practice, and an exciting and viable vision for the future. I very highly recommend this book." —Ellen Galinsky, President, Families and Work Institute, and author of Ask the Children: The Breakthrough Study that Reveals How to Succeed at Work and Parenting "Time to Care is full of creative and practical ideas about how to invest in and reform America's child care system to make it work better for everybody. Through these ideas, Lombardi powerfully reframes the child care debate as an opportunity for communities and society, not just a crisis confronting overwhelmed families. This wonderfully clear and engaging book will motivate and educate parents, citizen advocates and policymakers alike to get busy securing America's future." —J. Lawrence Aber, Ph.D., Director, National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University "Time to Care provides a strong vision of how quality child care can contribute to the education of children and the support of their families." —Helen Blank, Director, Child Care and Development, Children's Defense Fund "Time to Care is a compelling refutation of the widely held belief that the child care crisis in America is unresolvable—or that it can be resolved by simply relying on market forces. In this fluently written, thoroughly documented, and convincingly argued book, Joan Lombardi also provides a clear agenda for action to break the link, for children born into disadvantage, between poor beginnings and poor endings." —Lisbeth B. Schorr, Director, Project on Effective Interventions at Harvard University, and author of Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America

About the Author
Joan Lombardi served as the first Associate Commissioner for Child Care in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where she was responsible for the direction and leadership for the nation's child care assistance program. Prior to that, she served as the staff director for the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. She currently serves as an advisor to a number of national foundations and organizations including ZEROTOTHREE and the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington D.C.


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The first associate commissioner for child care in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and adviser to many national organizations, Lombardi provides a road map for mentally reframing and physically restructuring child care in this country. She makes her case by first exploring the history of education and child-care systems, explaining what went wrong, then quickly moving to what is needed and how to get it. She weaves together models of child development, countless studies from national educational organizations (e.g., ERIC, Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development), and case studies on local programs across the country to demonstrate the need to improve the quality and availability of child care for both preschool and school-age children. She discusses the staffing of child-care programs in depth and recommends using the time children spend in such programs to encourage positive development. We can do this, claims Lombardi, by perceiving this issue as an educational priority. The information is presented clearly and is supported by research and opinions from respected studies, educators, and policymakers. Appropriate for educators and child-care professionals; recommended for all libraries.-Deborah Bigelow, Leonia P.L., NJ Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.


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