Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 22, 1994                   TAG: 9403220039
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Neil Chetnik
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CHILD-CARE ISSUES AFFECT COMPANIES AS WELL AS FAMILIES

It's a hard sell, Stolley admits. Many corporate executives are older, traditional men whose wives stayed home with their children. And, as they keep telling Stolley, getting involved in their employees' child care would cost them too much money.

But Stolley, former editor of People and Life magazines, keeps plugging away, satisfied with small successes. While he may not be "creating a firestorm of enthusiasm," he says, "I do know we're beginning to change perceptions. We're planting seeds."

Like many men his age, Stolley once took child care for granted. When his four daughters were growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, his wife stayed home while he worked long hours as a correspondent for Life magazine, based in Washington, Los Angeles and other cities.

While he loved his kids, he says, "My primary role in child care was to pick up the baby sitter, and take the baby sitter home."

By the time he moved to New York to launch People in 1973, his children no longer needed baby sitters. And he admits that in his drive to make the magazine a success, he paid scant attention to the workplace changes required by the influx of women.

But his attitude changed one day in 1980 when he was confronted with the reality of modern child care.

One of his daughters, who worked at a Chicago day-care center, told him not to drop by her work during a particular hour-long period. Why? Because city inspectors were coming by at that time, and she would be out driving some kids around in a van so the inspectors wouldn't see that the center was overcrowded.

Stolley was appalled. For the first time, he realized that for many American workers, child care had become a crisis. Children were being warehoused, sometimes dangerously, because good, affordable child care wasn't available to their parents.

After he became editor of Life in 1980, he encouraged his magazine staff to write articles about child-care issues. And in 1985, he joined the board of CCAC, a New York-based advocacy group.

Quickly he became convinced that good child care not only helped parents, but also the businesses that hired them. The research showed that workers who get family benefits - such as flex-time, child-care referrals and on-site care centers - tend to be more loyal and productive.

Armed with such evidence, he led a successful push for an emergency child-care center at his own company. He also helped organize a national consortium of insurance companies to make it easier and cheaper for child-care centers to get insurance.

In 1992, he took over as CCAC president, and now, nearing retirement from Time Inc., he continues to travel nationally to address business leaders on the subject of child care. He says he "can't change centuries of attitudes," but he seems to be making an impact: Corporate leaders in New Orleans and Los Angeles recently began work on downtown, multicompany child-care centers after he made his pitch to them.

Stolley's greatest hope is that other men begin speaking out about children's needs. "I'm less sympathetic these days to young men who leave child care to their wives," he says. "It's no longer a women's issue. It's our issue too."

MEN-TION

Nearly 75 percent of employees surveyed at Johnson & Johnson Inc. said the company's family programs - flex-time, family-care leave, child-care referrals, adoption benefits and others - were "very important" in deciding whether to stay at the company., according to a 1993 survey by Families and Institute.

MALE CALL

Why do men generally leave child-care issues to women? How can that be changed? Send responses and comments to the Men's Column, in care of the features department, Roanoke Times & World-News, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010-2491.