Childcare plan is about boosting workforce not children or society

SO NOW I’ve read the whole thing and I know where we’re at. Our Government is proposing to further tip the balance against families who care for their own children by pricing them out of the market, writes Victoria White.

The inter-departmental working group on childcare which was given five months to map out future investment in childcare and reported last week, is proposing subsidised centre-based care for children from babyhood if both their parents — or their one lone parent — is working outside the home, in education or training.

Children who are cared for by one parent at home will not qualify for this “targeted” childcare unless they have the “highest level of need”. The majority of Irish families who lose one income when they keep one parent at home will now face, on top of tax individualisation, steeper competition for resources and deeper economic deprivation compared with double-income families with subsidised care.

True, the working group proposes a second free preschool year for all three to five-year-olds, with the aim of incentivising a school starting age of five instead of four. That’s to be welcomed. But one measly year is all the working group suggests a parent should stay home with his or her child. When a child hits one, it may just be able to waddle about which means it’s as good as reared, after all. So what the hell are you doing hanging about? Off to work full-time with you now, like good Mammies and Daddies. Working protects your child from poverty. You wouldn’t like your child to be poor, would you?

Alright, the report doesn’t actually say that children over the age of one fare better in creches than with their parents, though that was implied last week on radio by Children’s Minister James Reilly who warned of “antisocial behaviour” in kids who did not attend creche. The working group starts coming the heavy about the advantages of creche care from the age of two, leaving one year in limbo which no one wants to discuss.

That’s because one year’s maternity/parental leave is all the Government wants to discuss. And as the report points out, the high cost of providing the ratio of carers which babies require in creches makes creche care more expensive for everyone. So though providing the parental leave would be expensive at least you get a cost saving from getting the babies out of the creches.

But what’s to be done with toddlers of 14 months? Pass! Let’s whizz on to the age of two years, the very earliest point at which certain children can benefit from a very small amount of centre-based care. Except in the world of the inter-departmental working group which believes every single child over two gains from creche: “Any provision”, announces the report, “which increases the participation of children in more formalised/regulated settings over the age of two can be considered beneficial for children…” Really? Not according to the very UK childcare expert they quote, Ted Melhuish, who says there are no educational benefits to children except for those from very disadvantaged homes of attending preschool before the age of three years and that too much creche care at too early an age increases the risk of James Reilly’s bugbear “antisocial behaviour”.

The key issues for child development experts when it comes to formal childcare are how long and how early? But these are not issues which concern our inter-departmental group because they may impact on how soon and how much parents can work. So “quality” is the only watch word. As if “quality” could ever make up for too much, too soon.

The inter-departmental group says it’s proposing financially incentivising centre-based care for children and even babies in the hope that it might “change current parental choice away from current reliance on parental, unpaid relative and unregulated non-parental care”. Why would you want to change parents’ minds about forms of childcare which are working well and in fact mostly work better than centre-based care? In the UK a massive childcare survey in the mid-2000s on families, children and childcare found centre-based care to be the least appropriate model of care for young children, followed by relatives and childminders with parental care coming out on top for the under-3s. The childcare guru Penelope Leach, whose childcare manuals have sold millions of copies, interpreted the research as meaning “under the age of three, the less group care the better”. Alright, you do need your own research and thankfully we have the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study of our children, one of the best things to come out of the boom. Just a few weeks ago they published a study showing better outcomes, particularly in emotional regulation and literacy, for children cared for after school at home or with relations than children cared for in after-school centres.

So what does the inter-departmental group recommend? After-school in group settings, of course with capital grants going to community facilities and schools to provide such. Never mind the British Childcare Commission which found that kids don’t want to stay in their school buildings. Never mind the state of our schools, many of which do not even have kitchens.

This report is about one thing and one thing only: Getting women into the workforce. That’s why the EU has stuck its nose into the matter. The EU’s “Barcelona targets” state that childcare places should be provided for a third of under-3s and 90% of over-3s so their Mammies can get out to work on our ageing continent. This underlying aim is made all the plainer by the inter-departmental group’s comment that the European Commision thinks our ECCE scheme offers too few hours to too few children, “significantly below that which is considered necessary to support labour market activation”.

I have always considered myself a good European but I don’t think the EU has any place telling me how to rear my children. Particularly when they don’t even make a pretence of consulting expert advice on what is best for children, let alone consulting parents or the children themselves. The only advice I want on childcare is from other parents and from qualified child psychologists, none of whom recommends the 40 hours a week of centre-based care which our Government is preparing to subsidise for babies and young children.

Our economy needs workers. But we need to have a mature discussion about how many workers we need for how much economic growth. And about what we are prepared to sacrifice in terms of parental choice and the welfare of communities for which advantages, including things we all want like intervention for disabled kids and the next big cancer drug.

You can make a reasoned argument that we can’t afford to offer parents the choice to stay home even for a few years, even part-time. I’ll listen. But not if you lie and tell me it’s for the good of the children.

This report is about one thing and one thing only: Getting women into the workforce.