When Sheila Marcelo had her first son, Ryan, she was a junior at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and couldn't find day care close to campus with room for him. So she asked her mother to come from California to live with her and her husband, Ron, until something opened up.
Eight years later, her son Adam was born. Marcelo had just graduated from Harvard Business School and was working long, irregular hours at an Internet start-up. Again desperate, she asked both parents to move in. But when her father had to have emergency heart surgery, her parents needed to move out, and Marcelo scrambled for backup. Eventually, a cousin moved in. "We cobbled it together somehow," she says. "It's something so many moms go through."
Marcelo, now 38, believes the U.S. is facing a child-care crisis: According to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, there are 14.5 million kids under 6 who need care, but only 10.8 million openings in legally operating centers. These facts and her own experiences inspired Marcelo (whose sons are now 17 and 9) to launch Care.com in 2006. Today, the national company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has 500,000 users and thousands of listings, from babysitters to day-care centers to home health assistance to special-needs tutors. Users post free descriptions of their requirements—say, a part-time nanny in San Diego who drives and speaks Spanish—and view a list of matches. For a fee, they can get contact information, see background checks, and request preliminary references.
"I was never comfortable looking for caregivers in online classifieds," Marcelo says. And yet she felt fine calling up a piano teacher who posted a sign at the library. "I asked myself, 'Why do I feel comfortable with local ads and not online ones?' Somehow the Internet made these people feel distant. So I wanted to figure out how to use the Internet to create that local feeling." Every caregiver listed on the site has been screened by a team of 40 mothers who work part-time for the company, and users are encouraged to be choosy.
In fact, Marcelo recently used Care.com to find the perfect fit for her own family: Adam had always wanted a little sister, so last year she used the service to locate a nanny who brought her 8-month-old daughter when she watched him. Adam fell in love, and the situation worked for everyone. That's Marcelo's idea of quality child care—care that also provides peace of mind. "You could have wonderful, skilled relatives," she says. "But if they drive you crazy, that's not quality."
She's thrilled that President Obama has already allocated $10 billion for his Zero to Five program to improve care for young children, and that Michelle Obama has drawn attention to the work-life balance. But if she had the president's ear, Marcelo would urge him to go even further. "We need tax credits or grants to make care affordable for every family," she says. "How can you pursue your dreams—or even go to work—if you can't find care for your loved ones?"
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