Balance quality pre-schooling with education and support for parents
By focusing on quality improvements alone, we have separated the child from the family and the family from the child to generate leverage in public policy. By failing to look at the child in the wider context, we are feeding a disconnect between policies that serve children and policies that serve their parents.
The relationship between the social mobility of parents, adult mental health and child outcomes is impossible to disentangle. There is a disconnect between policy interventions for vulnerable children and interventions for their parents. A child’s development unfolds in, and responds to, their home environment. This is a time of tremendous opportunity, but also of tremendous risk. When a child grows up in the adverse circumstances associated with poor life outcomes — economic hardship, limited parent education or ethnic minority status — the burden can be insurmountable.
A study of child outcomes in pre-school, commissioned as part of the government-supported National Early Years Access Initiative, found that socially generated disparities between children, as observed at the beginning of the free pre-school year, remain unchanged or widen as the year progresses. The impact of a pre-school year will either be modest, or negated by the adversity in a child’s life. These findings are discouraging for a universal early-childhood intervention aimed at equal opportunities.
But are these findings surprising? After all, we have a long-established DEIS programme in primary and secondary education to roll out universal and targeted interventions.
Child poverty levels in Ireland have increased from 6.3 %, in 2008, to 9.9%, in 2012. That is stark. Socially generated gaps in early childhood are likely to persist throughout primary and secondary school and even into adulthood. This should have radical implications for early childhood policy.
We must intervene at the earliest possible time in a vulnerable child’s life, long before pre-school. We must improve the capacity of parents to achieve economic security to enable them to provide a stable, consistent environment in which young children can thrive. The most obvious way of doing this is employment.
As well as improving child outcomes, childcare should be a social mobility enabler for parents. Therein lies the problem. A long-established barrier for parents is the inability to afford childcare, due to an absence of supports for working families.
Despite numerous reports, surveys and media debates, this is an issue no-one wants to touch. The first major independent nationwide report on childcare as a barrier to employment was conducted by Indecon International Economic Consultancy Group, for Donegal County Childcare, in 2013. The report revealed that a two-child family spends €16,500 annually on full-time childcare —a cost that is unaffordable for a high percentage of working families. These barriers to employment are severe among lower-income groups, with 56% indicating that childcare prevented them from looking for a job, enclosing them in a welfare trap when their children are young.
The provision of a second, free pre-school year is occasionally mooted as a remedy to the cost of childcare and the parents ability to work. This is disingenuous.
At best, it comes under the banner ‘it’s better than nothing’. Even if the family can pay the full cost of childcare, in the intervening time between going back to work, following maternity leave, to the child starting pre-school at three years and three months, the support only covers three-and-a-half hours per day for 38 weeks of the year, for one year.
Despite the repeated mantra about women’s lack of participation in leading roles in society, child and family policy does nothing to support the career mobility, professional prospects, or earning potential of women. The low-pay premium for part-time work reinforces the welfare trap that constrains so many parents with young children.
If the economy is improving, now is the time to move beyond child-focused enrichment and enable parents to improve the economic stability of their family, to be productive workers and contributing members of society. It is time we called for fully integrated, child- and adult-focused supports that will actually disrupt socially generated disparities, rather than offering a pale imitation of what parents need. To do otherwise would be economically exorbitant and morally inexcusable.
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