Mather House Master Sandra A. Naddaff '75, who has two children ages 9 and 14, said that such services were not available 14 years ago when she first came to Harvard. Naddaff, who said the changes are unlikely to affect her now that her children are older, praised the increases in funds and hours.

"I think they're wonderful," she said. "They will be an enormous help to faculty members who have young children and who need the kinds of support these services will provide."

Eliot House Senior Tutor Margaret Bruzelius '74, whose four older children are also past the need for daycare, said these changes would have been helpful when her children were younger.

"The first year I was here was one of those years when [my children] first got the chicken pox, and then they got pneumonia," she said. "I was really worried that I was going to go through the 50 hours--that [additional time] is something I could have used," Bruzelius said.

But one junior professor said the changes do not go far enough.

"Parents in a Pinch is a very specialized, particular kind of service that doesn't address regular everyday daycare needs," she said. "And for the scholarships, the money is in a single pool that serves staff and faculty, and you need to qualify financially.

"You need to compete and you need to qualify according to some mathematical formula," the junior professor added. "Faculty tend to look less needy than staff, so junior faculty are not always able to get the scholarships they would like to get."