seems to us to be entirely in keeping with modern thinking. We have to accept that people are parents and that people do have children and that parents are in the work place to stay. There is no longer a stay at home spouse or, indeed, a grannie at home to look after the kids. That being the case, children have to be looked after now or they will be even more expensive when they stray later.

Children of working parents require care. It is really as simple as that. The concept seems to us to have been a long time coming to Bermuda. But now that the issue has been raised we think the idea should be extended from the hotels to other major businesses.

Bermuda has to face the fact that the care giver for children is, more often than not, the mother. Bermuda is a country of working mothers, many of them single parents. Very often arranging for the care of their children during working hours can be very difficult and very expensive.

Because of the difficulties involved in child care and the fact that the parents must work, sometimes children do not receive the best of care or are even left at too early an age to fend for themselves. That has all sorts of dangers and can lead to the most undesirable consequences.

Bermuda suffers from the same problem as many other countries. Its entire community structure is still based on a long gone system. Once upon a time, fathers worked one job, mothers stayed home to keep house and look after the children, and after school those children went home to cookies made by grannie. It was good that they came home early and had summers off because they could help with planting and weeding the onions. We continue to operate Bermuda as if that fairy tale life still exists.

Today the father has an extra night job, mother works until at least 5 p.m., grannie is also working or out on the town and there is no one home with the store-bought cookies. Any child who goes home is likely to be alone.

Yet we have never adjusted our institutions to cope with this reality. Just about everyone works yet we continue to open our institutions during the same hours people work, thus making it difficult for people to get there. As an example, in other countries banks are adopting user friendly hours but in Bermuda banks spend fortunes attracting customers and open only when their customers are at work. Does that make sense? In very many ways we have changed our lifestyle completely without changing the institutions which serve a lifestyle. Where child care is concerned, we should have changed education and child care services to match the working style of parents. But we did not do that and still dump our children out of the schools and into the streets in mid-afternoon and wonder why they get into trouble.

Since we have not chosen to adjust the system, then we have to help working parents in another way and that involves care centres at major places of work.

The BIU apparently asked for day care centres but we also have to wonder what could be provided for parents who serve the hotels at night.