NONFICTION - Jan. 22, 1995

MINDING THE CHILDREN: Child Care in America From Colonial Times to the Present by Geraldine Youcha. (Scribner: $26; 413 pp.) One is reminded, reading this history of childcare, of a poem by Mark Strand called “Save the Babies.” First they were indentured, then apprenticed, then left in settlement houses or orphanages. Orphan trains, foster care, nannies coming and going. Taken from their original mothers, suckled by wet nurses, tied to kitchen tables during the work day; Penelope Leach might not like it, but day care is not the most evil alternative to come down the pike. Caught between changing philosophies of child rearing and bad-to-worse economic positions in American society, it’s the mothers’ awful choices or lack thereof that author Youcha is most interested in. Women have always helped each other raise the babies, she writes almost proudly. “Children have been helped and hurt by any system,” she writes. Still, you’ll want to rush home, just to check on them.