A mother’s love for a dying son inspired her to start a business to help others.
Looking back on the happy times, Cathy Leibow remembers most the gentle laughter that fluttered in the air as she blew soapy bubbles with her son, Jason.
It would not be long before Leibow would discover that Jason’s little heart was as fragile as the bubbles that floated just beyond his eager reach.
But it would be quite some time before Leibow realized that in the heartbreak over her child’s death were sown the seeds of personal triumph.
Jason’s story began in 1987 when, a few short hours after he was born, Leibow and her husband, Corey, learned they would have to face the daunting task of raising a child with Down’s syndrome.
From the time he was an infant, Jason needed constant stimulation and special classes to help him learn how to walk and talk. In her exhaustive research of Jason’s condition, Cathy Leibow, a working mother, was dismayed to find so few resources available to working parents struggling to care for special-needs children.
At every turn, she found herself telling the same story over and over again as she sought out a skilled caregiver so she could return to her part-time job at Intel Corp. One day-care worker wanted to know when Jason would outgrow Down’s syndrome; if it wasn’t the Down’s syndrome, it was Jason’s heart condition that scared off the others.
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In the quiet hours of an early morning as Leibow nursed her infant son, she woke her husband and vowed to start a company that would help families like theirs. It was a promise she reaffirmed in grief when open-heart surgery was unable to repair Jason’s congenital defects, the tiny holes in his left and right ventricles that snuffed out her 2-year-old’s life in the spring of 1989.
“I hear people say things happen for a reason, but it’s hard to believe that losing a life, that there’s really a reason for that,” Leibow said. “But I did start a business because of Jason, and I value that legacy.”
Today, that business, christened FamilyCare Inc. and based in Pleasanton, Calif., has matured from one mother’s love into a successful work-life company that contracts with major Bay Area companies to help workers find everything from child care to elder care.
The child-care crisis resonates with American workers, workplace experts say. Families pay 60 percent of the $40 billion spent on child care each year while government pays 39 percent and businesses pick up just 1 percent.
The logic behind resource and referral services is simple: The less time and energy workers have to spend on personal matters, the more time and energy they can devote to their jobs.
Working parents, members of the “sandwich generation,” often need help coping with the twofold responsibility of caring for their children and their own parents, Leibow said. Trained counselors at referral and resource services can easily find good hospice care as easily as a good preschool. They can also handle requests that unnecessarily consume people’s time, Leibow said, such as finding a dogsitter for a Dalmatian, a masseuse to knead aching muscles or financial aid for a college-bound child.
It’s a work-life strategy that’s catching on in corporate America. Forty percent of the 1,050 major national firms polled by Hewitt Associates in a 1996 survey offer resource and referral services to their employees.
“As more and more employers implement these programs, it raises the bar for other employers,” Leibow said. “Companies can’t afford to lose good employees who don’t come back to work because they can’t find child care.”
A working parent herself, Leibow knows the difficult choices some families are forced to make. After Jason was born, a social worker handed Leibow an outdated book on “mongolism,” an early term for Down’s syndrome, which painted a grim picture of a child who could never function or live independently in the world.
It took hundreds of hours for Leibow to locate the information, support groups and early intervention programs she needed to know Jason had every chance to live a normal life. But child care remained her greatest obstacle. If Leibow had not found an occupational therapist staying at home with her own children who could offer the patience and energy Jason’s condition demanded, she too would have had to quit her job. The frustration Leibow felt seemed to mirror the experiences of other families and shaped her vision for a child-care referral agency.
At first, Leibow opened the business out of her home while she continued to work part time. She hired a full-time employee to help shoulder the workload after she landed Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as her first corporate account. After Jason’s death, Leibow quit her job as a systems support manager at Intel Corp. and broadened the scope of her business to encompass all kinds of referrals.