This budget incentivises behaviour that damages babies and toddlers

I will fight until I am a toothless granny against the full-time institutionalisation of babies and toddlers, writes Victoria White.

THE Government knows that full-time crèche care puts babies and toddlers at risk of developing anti-social behaviour but is providing it anyway.

This budget incentivises behaviour which damages children. Parents will be financially supported to put babies who are six months old into group daycare all day, every day. They will be supported, even to the tune of €8,000 a year, if those babies are in care for longer rather than shorter periods, with the maximum incentive applying to centre-based care of 40 hours a week.

Let’s be quite clear about this: The Government is subventing practices which they know can be harmful to children. Prof Edward Melhuish’s report for the UK National Audit Office, referenced by the interdepartmental working group’s report to our Government, states: “There is evidence that high levels of childcare, particularly group care, in the first or second years, may elevate the risk of developing anti-social behaviour.”

This issue begins to arise when a baby or toddler is in daycare longer than 20 or 25 hours a week, explained Melhuish to The Guardian. This problem does not arise with care by relations, which is associated, he concludes, with “improved social development”.

So what do we go and do? We deliberately go out to incentivise full-time centre-based care for kids in their first two years. By contrast, we provide no supports for care by relations, be they grannies or aunties or uncles or big sisters. We provide no support for childminders minding fewer than four unrelated children who can’t register with Tusla.

Most importantly, we provide no supports for care by parents themselves, found to be the best possible care for children under two by the largest survey ever conducted in the UK, Families, Children and Childcare and by nearly any other study you care to mention.

This is also the mode of care chosen by 62% of parents of babies aged nine months and 63% of parents of five-year-olds, while centre-based care is chosen by 11% and 10% respectively. Grannies, other relations, and childminders make up the balance.

The only young kids for whom family care is not the best available are the unfortunate children whose parents are unable to provide them with a decent home environment. Their home life is so bad they are better off in care. Full-time out-of-home care, with “home visits”, is found by Edward Melhuish to improve their lifetime opportunities. Amen to that. But it hardly warrants taking the majority of Irish children away from their parents in their babyhood for their own safety.

And let’s be very clear about something else: A poor home does not necessarily mean poor parenting. We have to be very careful that we don’t pull out the one anchor in economically disadvantaged children’s lives by sending them to daycare. And we have to be doubly careful that we don’t take the purpose out of their mothers’ lives, like the well-meaning Australian missionaries who took Aboriginal children from their parents and sent them to orphanages.

The inter-departmental report to Government on which Katherine Zappone’s childcare package is based was no doubt written with complete sincerity but to my eyes it is spectacularly biased. It states in its opening passages, “there is a multiplicity of evidence that investment in early years improves outcomes for children and families”. That is true but it is not true as it is meant to be understood: That long hours of daycare are good for all children. Children from disadvantaged homes benefit from early full-time out-of-home care while other children do not.

By contrast, Ted Melhuish begins the report which the inter-departmental group cites with the statement: “High quality childcare has been associated with benefits for children’s development, with the strongest effects for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. There is also evidence that sometimes negative effects occur.”

No “negative effects” are allowed to sully the prose of the interdepartmental group’s report. Nor do we ever hear that the cost benefits, cited constantly by government politicians and their embedded reporters as multiplying up to 16 times every dollar invested in childcare, refer to targeted preschool services for massively disadvantaged US communities, coupled with weekly home visits.

The “savings” itemised are largely the effects of crime avoided, even down, in one case, to the lifetime earnings of two young women who were murdered at the age of 27 — a misfortune which rather trumps the fact that they missed out on preschool. Melhuish describes any inference that these “savings” apply to more everyday preschool services as “misleading”.

Melhuish later told The Guardian that the child-to-adult ratio necessary for the best care for children under two, and particularly under 18 months, means paying a parent to stay home would cost the same: “We know the importance for infants in the first two years of responsive individual attention for significant parts of the day to develop their socio-interactive skills.

“We also know that the responsiveness of group care is much less than in other childcare settings such as childminders,” he said.

“To improve the responsiveness of group care requires maintaining very high staff-infant ratios and keeping staff turnover down to an absolute minimum: Both are very expensive.”

He noted that when parents in Sweden were given the chance to stay home for 18 months they “voted with their feet”.

Meanwhile Mother Ireland thinks parents are a danger to their children after their first year. You can also see the worried red pen hovering above the report of the inter-departmental group, in case parents might take it into their heads to stay home for more than a year: “Parents need to be supported to make choices which are good for children, such as being able to take on the role of primary care-giver when that is best (under the age of one).”

If you want to be supported to make the choice which you think is good for your children and stay home with your kids past the age of one you are on your own. And you are committing financial suicide. The Stay-at-Home-Parents Alliance Ireland, which was founded just two weeks ago and has almost 1,000 members, did comparisons of one-income and two-income households which benefit from the new crèche subvention and came out with a differential of €7,000 a year.

But it’s not all about money. It’s not all about that cliché, the “second mortgage” when nobody questions the mortgage on bricks and mortar.

The people with influence in the media and in government nearly all worked full-time through their children’s young lives and they are determined to defend their legacy. Few are prepared to listen to the young parents in the Stay-at-Home-Parents Alliance.

But I will make them this commitment: I will fight until I am a toothless granny against the full-time institutionalisation of babies and toddlers.

I will fight for an interval of magic in the lives of young parents and for babies and toddlers who know puddles and dogs and communities and surprises.