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There is an increasing recognition of the importance quality child care plays in balancing work and family life among faculty and staff at universities. It is also true for graduate students and postdocs where both parents are not home during the day.
For faculty, child care is of special concern. Day care is not only scarce, but expensive. Faculty parents are sometimes new to the Boston area and cannot tap into informal family or community resources which they might have had in their communities of origin. While faculty sometimes have flexibility, they also work long hours and irregular summer schedules. Many faculty and staff share common backgrounds and interests and seek an environment where their children can share this richness.
A growing number of universities recognize that they are major employers and like other major employers, have a responsibility to develop day care opportunities and to provide other services to support parents. While there are altruistic motives at work, there are also competitive reasons to address this growing need. For example, prospective faculty may be more impressed with an offer of a faculty appointment from a university that provides child care than from one offering a faculty club.
MIT is planning a new child care center as part of the Stata Complex, scheduled to open in 2003. Based on the recommendation of a faculty committee chaired by Professor Leigh Royden that explored child care issues, and following the trend of other large, family-friendly employers and universities, MIT seeks to expand community resources in this important area. When all phases are complete, as many as 104 new slots will be added. Significantly, a large number of the slots will provide care to infants. MIT child care facilities will serve children of MIT faculty, staff, and students on a priority basis, and will include children from the wider community, if space permits.
MIT is not new to this activity. The new center will be the first on-campus facility added at MIT since 1965 when the Technology Nursery School (then at Westgate), later named Technology Children's Center (TCC), opened a second site at Eastgate. There is also a child care facility at Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington.
The new center at the Stata Complex will be a state-of-the-art facility designed by world-renowned architect Frank O. Gehry and Associates, with Gail Sullivan Associates, a local architecture firm specializing in child care facilities, serving as program architect. Members of the MIT community can view a rendering of the Stata Center at http://ciis.lcs.mit.edu/.
The present attention to child care does not lessen the need to acknowledge and search for approaches to other aspects of the work-family balance. Members of the community are wrestling with managing their obligation to care for elderly parents and ill spouses and partners. Others worry about the activities of older children after school. Parents who already have dependable child care arrangements have special needs during school vacation times and when caretakers or their children are ill.
As part of the planning for the new center, the Stata Child Care Center Committee is currently surveying members of the community about their child care needs and concerns. If you currently have children under age 13 or if you expect to have children in the next 5 years, you are invited to complete the survey by going to the Web at http://web.mit.edu/personnel/www/frc/.
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