TRAVERSE CITY -- Erin Heide would love it if her daughter Ally could attend a full-time preschool with other children her age.
But there are few options in Heide's hometown of Bellaire that meet her work schedule and price range.
More children today have working parents who rely on child care, she said, and current systems have to do better to accommodate them.
"We're kind of confronted with that mentality that you should be able to raise your kids on your own until school," said Heide, who raises Ally, 3, and Elise, 6, on her own. "I would love to have my kids home all day, every day, but it's just not an option for me."
A grant-funded child advocacy group is working to improve young children's health, safety and education -- including child care and preschool -- through a state project known as Great Start.
It aims to strengthen programs and resources for parents to improve children's well-being.
The local Great Start includes Grand Traverse, Benzie, Leelanau, Antrim, Kalkaska and Manistee counties. The group issued a report featuring various demographic data to highlight areas that need work.
More than 63 percent of children younger than 6 in each county have working parents, the report shows.
The percentage of students receiving free or reduced school lunches in 2007-08 topped the state average in all but Grand Traverse and Leelanau counties.
And more than 20 percent of new mothers in Manistee County, on average, didn't have a high school diploma from 2005 to 2007.
The data is meant to highlight the importance of children's formative years, and encourage those with a stake in their development to begin tackling reforms, said Mary Sue Wilkinson, a Great Start specialist.
Ultimately, Wilkinson said, graduation rates increase and crime rates decrease when children are raised in healthy and stable environments.
"People need good information," she said. "It's not like running people's lives, but it does mean that as a society we're really not being very smart if we don't pay some attention to those early years."
Wilkinson and other participants will take the report to parents, businesses, educators, human services agencies and others in coming weeks for feedback.
A plan will be written in January to outline specific improvement goals and ways to tell if strategies are working.
Community interaction is a good first step because many problems aren't exclusively local, said Kathy Kundrat, Head Start program director for the Northwest Michigan Community Action Agency.
More affordable child care, for one, won't be realized unless the state and national governments also make it a priority, Kundrat said.
"The new family dynamics are just so complicated that I think we can't imagine going to back to the days when moms stayed at home," she said. "It really is a whole societal shift."
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