Reposted from The New York Times.

Earlier this month, a mother in North Augusta, S.C., was arrested after authorities learned that she had dropped her 9-year-old daughter off at a nearby park while she worked her shift at a McDonald’s restaurant. That news, along with a flurry of reports last week that she was fired from her job — later found to be erroneous — prompted public debate about the the difficulty of finding and affording child care.

One sympathetic woman, a stranger to the mother, even began a crowdfunding campaign on YouCaring.com called “Support Debra Harrell.” To date, it has raised nearly $40,000, far exceeding its $10,000 goal.

The kindness of strangers is always welcome. But what working mothers really need are systematic ways to find and afford safe, local care options for their kids. While many parents scramble to find care in the summer months, especially for older children out of school, it’s a year-round challenge for families with kids younger than preschool age. Twelve million infants (from birth to 4 years old) are in daily care with someone other than a primary parent,according to the Census Bureau.

Resources for choosing a child-care provider are antiquated. Only 27 states even post reports online on both regular monitoring and inspections of child-care centers, and only 24 do for home-based child-care. In California, according to a recent report by The Center for Investigative Reporting, parents had to actually go in person or call during business hours to request reports on one of the 48,000 state-licensed day care, preschool and after-school programs. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, reports aren’t available online.

Costs are high. Child Care Aware America, a national organization focused on quality childcare, reports that the annual cost of day care for an infant is more than the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges in 31 states. And according to the news site Vox, the problem is just getting worse; the cost of child care is growing at nearly twice the rate of prices economy-wide.

Quality of care is critical. We are learning more every day about how important the first three years are to brain development. Synapses essentially organize the brain by forming pathways that connect the parts of the brain governing everything we do. According to Zero to Three, a national advocacy group for families with infants, a healthy toddler may create two million synapses per second. The adults they interact with and the environments they’re in on a regular basis hugely impact the quantity and quality of these connections — influencing the rest of their lives.

Given that the stakes are so high and the costs so steep, how does an already overwhelmed working parent find a decent, affordable child-care provider?

The Most Basic Safety

Parents in some places are provided with more satisfying answers than in others. South Carolina, where Harrell is fighting to keep her daughter, is ranked 45th in the country for quality child care by Child Care Aware America.

But other states are demonstrating that some simple steps can go a long way in helping parents connect with the resources they need. Take Indiana (rated 12th). Parents in the Hoosier state can start by checking out the official inspection records of any day care center online at the Family and Social Services Administration website. This helps moms and dads figure out fundamentals about the safety of a prospective childcare provider, in addition to more subtle information, like when and how food is served, how many providers are on site or whether pets are allowed on the premises.

But getting the complete reports online is only half the battle. Many parents don’t have time to read them, and those who do can find them difficult to understand. Many are written in county code, not plain language.

Some child-care centers are reviewed on existing portals like Yelp, but there are drawbacks to trying to get good information there. Yelp doesn’t include inspection reports along with its customer reviews, and as Melanie Brizzi of the Family and Social Services Administration Bureau of Child Care in Indiana explains, there’s an economic incentive for centers to drum up good reviews. “Families have always relied on word of mouth. Yelp is the newest form of that, but parents have to remember that it is a commercial site,” not one designed to best serve families.

In Indiana, parents don’t just have access to the official inspections. They can also educate themselves by going to Paths to Quality, a website where regulated child-care providers can volunteer to be rated on a simple scale of 1 to 4. No bureaucratic language to wade through here. They’ve even produced a video explainer that helps parents understand the various issues they might consider when choosing day care.

So why is it that Indiana has managed to create such accessible resources for busy parents and other states, like South Carolina and California, are stuck in the dark ages?

Part of the answer is that Indiana was ahead of the legislative curve. A statute passed in 2000 required the local bureau to post inspection information online (California just passed a similar statute). By 2001, Indiana was complying.

Moving Beyond Compliance

But as the decade wore on, its ambition grew beyond mere compliance. By 2006, the state began training inspectors to record their findings in the field on small tablet computers. Not only did this save time for the inspectors, but there were fewer errors created by transferring data from paper to computer. Monitoring became easier with the custom-built system; noncompliance could be tracked automatically. Indiana worked with a tech company called the Consultants Consortium to build the web-based portal and train the inspectors. The transition was complete by 2007.

Every state has a number of physical centers that parents can go to for references to quality child-care providers and other information on subsidies. They’re known as Child Care Resource and Referral centers, or C.C.R.&R.’s.

But these centers vary greatly in their quality. And parents just don’t use many of them.

Indiana, recognizing that many people don’t have the time or desire to go to a physical center, created a centralized call service in 2012. Indiana’s friendly operators gather relevant information (the family’s home address, number of kids and their ages, how much parents can pay and what days they need help, their preferences regarding in home vs. stand-alone center vs. ministerial care, etc.) and then compile a customized list of good options for the caller which they can email or go over in real time on the phone. They can even read inspections with callers to be sure they understand the nature of violations.

These same operators also field any complaints, which further holds providers accountable between inspections, and helps worried parents find alternative care options as quickly as possible.

The call center, which fielded nearly 9,000 calls last year, is open during regular business hours, but has extended hours once a week and is also open Saturdays. Parents can leave a message and are guaranteed to get a call back within 24 hours. They can also email.

The Economic Case for Quality Care

To be sure, Indiana’s population (7 million) is small compared with those of many other states (including California, which has 38 million residents), but the majority of fixes — inspectors armed with tablets in the field, the easier-to-understand ranking system, the centralized call center — wouldn’t be difficult to scale.

The class implications are startling. Working-class parents are less likely to have maternity and/or paternity leave — special time to start nurturing those first synapses and smiles themselves; they also don’t have as much flexibility during the workday to visit referral centers, tour day care centers or request inspection reports in person.

States like Indiana that have committed to helping parents find and afford quality care are making an investment in the future of their state, and the nation.

Ted Maple, the president and chief executive of the Day Nursery Association of Indianapolis, believes that making it easier for parents to find quality care isn’t just right, but smart for states (especially those struggling to lower unemployment). In fact, the economic argument was pivotal in helping Indiana pass recent legislation that will help more kids — especially poor kids — thrive in safe, stimulating day care settings. Maple explains, “We had great bipartisan support for the bill, in large part, because business got behind it. Big employers argued that it’s hard for them to retain great workers when they can’t find or afford quality child care. There is a growing recognition in the business community that early childhood education has a long-term payoff.”

The Indiana law, which goes into effect in May, also provides incentives to day care centers to improve their facilities and hire more workers through increased reimbursement rates for good inspections. That’s good for cash-strapped caregivers, too.

While few studies exist on the link between improving parents’ capacity to find quality child care and a thriving economy, related research on the bottom line benefits of early-childhood programs are plentiful. In 2007, for example, Ludwig of the University of Chicago and Deborah Phillips of Georgetown found that there was a $7 to $9 return on investment for every $1 invested in Head Start, a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families.

There is some controversy surrounding studies like these, but most researchers agree that Head Start, and programs like it, have been shown to have lasting positive effects on children in areas such as future college attendance and fewer criminal offenses in young adulthood, among others.

Brizzi explains, “Too often we still see that the poorest quality room in a child-care center is the one that has the infants and toddlers. It’s an afterthought — the babies just need to be fed and have their diapers changed. But there is a growing awareness, thanks to all of the great research coming out, about how important the infant stage really is.

Now we need to get that research out and make a focused investment that starts with empowering parents. We have a long way to go.”