Day care grows up

When kids answer the perennial question — “What do you want to be when you grow up?” — their replies lean toward the most well-known occupations: police officer, firefighter, superhero.

Often, children will grow out of these fantasies with the onset of adulthood — Donna Blanchard for example, now the director of the Hoag Child Care Center, used to want to be an architect. While she loves her job, she said, she’s used to receiving Christmas presents with an architectural bent, and seeing rooms through the eyes of a planner.

“I’ll go: ‘There should be a window there,’ or, ‘Look at that small closet, I could knock down a wall in my bedroom and make it a walk-in,’” she said.

Thus, after surrounding herself with imaginative youths for 17 years, it was only fitting that Blanchard take a few baby steps of her own toward the aspiration, assisting with the planning and development of a new child care center at the hospital.

Now, while the child care veteran concedes that child care is her “calling,” she can add this new facility to her architectural resume: doubling the hospital’s day care capacity to about 90 children. The new center will provide day care for Hoag Hospital employees who have kids from 6 weeks to 12 years old.

Constructed in 30 parts, the center was trucked into Newport and put together into a beautiful outdoor facility, replete with a courtyard, several classrooms, and even a small water park for the children.

To celebrate, children on Monday held a small parade from their old facility to their new one, singing rounds of “The Ants Go Marching” and riding tricycles to their new home, followed by lunch and a well-earned nap.

Nationally, the growth of on-site day care benefits — a practice that gained some popularity in the latter part of the 20th century — has started to stagnate, as rising expenses and liabilities deter companies from the costly practice, UCI business professor Jone L. Pearce said.

“I don’t see it as a particularly spreading trend,” she said. “Usually, when employers do something costly like this, they are trying to make themselves attractive to potential employees.”

Also, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing slowed the trend, Pearce said.

“The building in the Oklahoma City bombing had a day care center in it,” she said. “Lots of people [in business] saw that and thought it may attract some kind of trouble.”

The trend is much more prevalent in Europe, where large employers tend to offer broader benefits to employees, a development she hopes will be realized in the United States.

“It’s really good for parents because they feel they can go down and see the kids, and [it] helps them feel safer,” she said. “Everyone feels more comfortable that way.”

CHRIS CAESAR may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or at chris.caesar@latimes.com.