Call her naive, but Shana Schoepke of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, never imagined that finding child care for her baby would be a problem. Then she started looking for it. And looking. And...looking. “Most of the good places just don’t advertise, so when we finally saw an ad for one in the Cobble Hill Courier, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, let’s just go there!’?” she recalls. Schoepke thought everything was fine until the day care was shut down six months later because the owner wasn’t fully licensed. Since the facility seemed clean and the staff friendly and well trained, Schoepke gave the owner the benefit of the doubt and kept her son enrolled once the day care reopened. A year later, though, the place was closed again—this time because it didn’t have a rear exit—leaving Schoepke in a bind two days before the Thanksgiving holiday. “I was frantic,” says Schoepke, who, as a costume designer, didn’t have the week off.

Sad to say, Schoepke’s story is one that’s familiar to many parents in a city where families are growing—and child-care centers are not. “Neighborhoods are being rapidly developed, but the city has no strategy in place for child care,” says Nancy Kolben, executive director of Child Care, Inc., a nonprofit resource and referral agency that also works to expand child-care options in NYC. “Tribeca is a perfect example. Nobody thought people with families would move down there, yet that’s exactly what has happened.”

According to the group’s research, only 56 percent of children in New York City ages newborn to five years have access to full-day regulated child care. That’s just 122,686 slots for 216,882 kids. And for children under age two, the number is even bleaker: New York City has regulated child-care service for fewer than 19 percent of the infants whose moms are working or on public assistance (18,699 slots for 99,772 children ages newborn to two). Kolben attributes this shortfall to the high cost of infant care. Under guidelines enforced by the city’s Bureau of Day Care, there must be two adult staff members per every eight children under age two, as opposed to the current norm of two adults for every 15 three-year-olds, 20 four-year-olds or 25 five-year-olds.

You may also have noticed that branches of large child-care centers such as KinderCare or La Petite Academy—abundant in the burbs of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut—are pretty much nonexistent in New York City. Chalk that up to the high cost of real estate and lack of space. “We just can’t compete with the smaller mom-and-pop establishments that don’t have as much corporate overhead,” says Nyla Diab, a project manager for the Learning Care Group, which owns La Petite Academy, Tutor Time and Child Time. The outfit’s child-care centers are typically 10,000 square feet, which would cost a hefty sum here. Adding to their overhead are staffing costs. New York State has very high regulatory standards and requires child-care centers to have a fully licensed teacher at the head of every classroom of kids over the age of two. Since these teachers are equipped to teach in the public school system, their financial requirements are higher (the starting salary for a city public school teacher is $48,000). “With space and staff being so expensive, New York just doesn’t fit the business model of the larger chains,” says Kolben.

As a result, parents are mainly left to rely on family day care (located in a provider’s home) or on nannies—though many moms and dads, surprisingly enough, balk at the latter option, and not just because of the money factor. “I don’t want my kid hanging out with an adult all day,” says Carmen Wong Ulrich, a mom to ten-month-old Bianca in Cobble Hill. “Even though she’s young, she already loves the other kids at day care.”

Unfortunately, many family day care providers are at capacity. After calling many who she says were “gruff and dismissive,” Ulrich says it was a friend’s recommendation that secured her daughter a spot in a family day care near her home. She also credits Bococa Parents, a message board for parents in Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, with providing invaluable resources. “It’s great to have these chatrooms for small neighborhoods, because that’s how you find things,” she says. “When it comes to child care, you have to be proactive.”

In this issue:

• Quest to hire: Some people think finding a job or a spouse in NYC is tough, but parents know the truth: The most maddening, elusive search is for a child-care provider you can afford—and trust.
• The nanny and the au pair
• 10 questions to ask a potential nanny or au pair
• The day-care provider
• 10 questions to ask a potential day-care provider
• Help wanted: We have the answers to your burning child care questions.
• NYC’s day-care crisis: In a city experiencing something of a baby boom, you’d think day-care centers would be popping up everywhere. And yet, working parents are still struggling to find care for their kids. Here’s why a slot in a center is harder to come by than a front table at the Waverly Inn.
• Referral resources
• O sitter, where art thou?: Mystery solved: Why there are so few affordable teen baby-sitters in New York City.
• Do the right thing: How to put your nanny on the books in five (mostly) easy steps.
• Break out: If you look hard enough (we did), you can find baby-sitting where you least expect it.
• Caregiver portraits
• The no-nanny diaries Two NYC parents share their own child care experiences.

Plus:

• The Expectant mother's guide: The where-to-go, what-to-buy and who-to-consult resource for giving birth in NYC.