Pay stay-at-home and working parents
Parents rate childcare in the top three issues driving their voting intentions in the next general election.
The findings are remarkable in that working parents struggling to meet childcare costs recognise that stay-at- home parents are equally in need of financial support. In all, 84% of households where both parents work favour a State payment to stay-at-home parents.
Likewise, nine out of 10 households where at least one parent is at home believe the Government should provide tax relief to working parents who pay for childcare.
The majority of the 1,081 parents surveyed in the Irish Examiner/Lansdowne Market Research poll agreed tax relief and stay-at-home payments should be the same. The parents surveyed all had children in the 0-14 age bracket. Almost half of parents surveyed (46%) were in favour of a 1% increase in the standard rate of income tax to fund childcare.
The survey highlights a high level of disillusionment with Government handling of the childcare issue. Over 84% of parents surveyed believe it has failed to properly address the issue of high-quality childcare. This is despite a policy of encouraging women to return to the workforce.
The survey also found just one-in-10 believes childcare is reasonably affordable in this country.
The survey reflects the high level of dependency on family members to bail out parents unable to meet formal childcare costs.
One-in-five households depend on family, primarily grandparents, and this figure rises to one-in-three relying on grandparents where both parents work and the children are of pre-school age.
The savings to parents who can rely on grand-parents to act as unpaid babysitters - in place of full-time crèche fees - range from €9,000 per annum in Dublin to €7,000 elsewhere.
Dr Valerie Richardson, head of the school of Applied Social Science at University College Dublin, said reliance on grandparents and family for free or cheap childcare is set to diminish due to increasing mobility and the fact that young families, out of economic necessity, move to new housing areas in order to obtain accommodation "and these are often away from their family of origin".
The grandparent pool will also diminish with the return of older people to the workforce, she said.
Just 6% of parents use crèches and of these, one in five believes it is not the ideal care arrangement.
This is particularly true in Dublin where parents are least happy with their childcare options and where children are less likely to be cared for by extended family. Not surprisingly, childcare is therefore a more important voting issue in Dublin. Proximity has twice the level of influence on a parent's choice of crèche than a recommendation.
Couples, where both parents work, admitted that having another child would force one of them to give up their job, cost being the main factor.
The households most in agreement that one parent would have to quit work if they extended family size were those with two children. Four out of 10 families with two children believe having a third child will take one of them out of the workforce.
A paltry one-in-four women return to full-time work once they have a family. The majority of new mothers opt to become full-time parents or work reduced hours. Full-time parenting is seen as the ideal childcare arrangement by the majority.
When it came to maternity leave, one-in-five working mums did not take their full entitlement. Only a small minority of parents (9%) availed of their unpaid parental leave entitlement.
Dr Deirdre Horgan, deputy director BA (Early Childhood Studies) at University College Cork, said there was little tangible support for women in the workplace from the Government.
"It is important for the Government to realise that parents need financial support. Public investment is less than 0.5% of GDP, which is the lowest in Western Europe."
Dr Margret Fine-Davis, senior research fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College, Dublin, said the Government and the social partners should work with employers to encourage greater use of flexible working patterns, including part- time work, job-sharing, reduced hours, tele-working and term-time working.
