Keep this warning in mind the next time you go searching for a warm and loving day-care setting for your child: Even a potential child abuser can make a good first impression.

The tender feelings we may associate with our own homelife can be a faulty criteria when deciding where to leave our children each morning, according to Deborah Spaide, a former Maine day-care operator who has written a book called “The Day Care Kit: A Parent’s Guide to Finding Quality Child Care.”

“Many parents feel enormously guilty about having to leave their kids for the first time and not knowing what to look for in child care,” said Spaide, who ran a large day-care center in Westbrook for 10 years and now lives in Connecticut. “Many people are premising their decisions on the places that give them a warm, gushy feeling. That is not the way to go about it.”

With half of all mothers presently in the workforce, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 10 million children are expected to be placed in some form of “alternate care” this year. Child care has become one of the most expensive items of an average family’s budget — behind housing, taxes, and food. Despite its growing importance in the social fabric of the country, Spaide said, many parents fail to apply the same businesslike standards when looking for child care as they do when investing their money or buying a house.

Parents must act like “investigators,” she said, using their heads rather than their hearts.

“Don’t rely on instincts,” Spaide said. “Choosing child care is such an emotional issue, with so many variables, that your instincts are confused already.”

The danger of emotional responses to child-care decisions became apparent to Spaide a few years ago after talking to a young mother who showed up at her day-care center.

“She said she was so excited and thrilled when she saw our ad in the yellow pages because it showed a mother cuddling a little baby,” Spaide recalled. “It frightened me that she had considered that in her decision. I had worked in the prison system with sexual offenders, and I had worked in a program for abusive mothers, and I found out just how cunning they could be. I knew that they could create an environment that parents wanted to see.”

“The Day Care Kit,” she said, is a response to the need for a more shrewd, less emotional, approach to finding child care. Clear, concise, and unadorned, the book is a step-by-step attempt to provide parents with the knowledge they will need to “ask intelligent questions during interviews” and make accurate interpretations from their observations.

Along with charts detailing the day-care standards in effect across the country, and a list of each state’s licensing boards, the book also includes a checklist that may alert parents to signs of abuse or neglect.

Some states, Spaide said, have yet to adopt any quality standards for their child-care services. Maine, on the other hand, has done well in keeping pace with the growing demand for child care in the state, she said.

Yet, with too few licensing inspectors to go around in Maine, parents are urged to be “their eyes and ears” in order to help detect substandard care.

Spaide, who helped write the laws governing infant day-care in Maine, now consults with corporations about providing day-care benefits for their employees’ children.

“There is definitely too little employer involvement nationwide,” she said. “Corporations are looking at the bottom line, and until they are forced to put out some money for day-care benefits, they are not going to.”

After speaking with many corporate executives, however, Spaide said she suspects that working parents don’t always tell their employers that they want help in paying for day care.

“Working moms are real concerned about being perceived as weak,” Spaide said. “They don’t want anything to detract from their professionalism, so they don’t complain. They complain to me, and to the media, but not to their employers.”

As child-care costs increase, she said, either government or private business must eventually offer some financial support to overburdened working parents.

“Government is likely to mess it up, so business should come in and fill that financial void,” Spaide said. “Studies have shown that where business has become involved, the quality of work has risen and the rate of absenteeism has gone down. It’s good for everybody.”