Toying with child care
Louisa Taylor
The Ottawa Citizen
2 Apr 06

Forget for a moment that child care is the newest battleground on Parliament Hill. Forget the ideology, the jargon and the lip service, and look at this number.

Roughly half of Canada's children between the ages of six months and five years were in some form of child care in 2001, the latest year for which Statistics Canada has figures. That's approximately 1 million young Canadians spending some or all of their day away from their parents.

Are they safe, or are they playing in needle-infested playgrounds? Are they cuddled or ignored? Are their growing brains being challenged with games and books or are they watching soap operas all afternoon? And the other million or so who are at home with mom or dad, are they getting the best care and support?

Their parents might know -- or think they know -- but as a country, we don't have a clue. Worse, most of us don't know how clueless we are, and some of us -- even those who have used child care in the past -- wonder why we should care.

You may think you're informed. You know the Conservatives want to give all families a $1,200 payment per child to put toward child care of their choosing, and use tax incentives to encourage businesses to open child-care spaces. You've read they plan to cancel federal-provincial deals the former Liberal government made that would have expanded child care and developed a framework for national standards. You might even have heard that the New Democrats want to push the Liberal plan further, by making child care a right protected by legislation, similar to health care.

Forget all that.

Far from elevating our understanding of the issue, the debate surrounding these proposals has instead divided families by pitting working parents against those who decide to care for their children at home. It has also obscured a fundamental problem: We are being offered partial solutions for a problem that has yet to be defined.

"Canadians really do have to ask themselves, what is it they want?" says Alan Mirabelli, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family. "What is the vision they have for raising the next generation of Canadians? Will it just be up to mom and dad, or do we have a shared interest?"

Mirabelli passionately believes we haven't talked broadly enough or deeply enough about the place of the family in Canadian society, and what we're prepared to do for them.

He's not alone on this. Scrape away their war paint, and ideological foes in the child-care debate are surprisingly united.

"The question really should be, How do you 'do' family policy? What else is needed? We haven't had any discussion about that," says Martha Friendly, co-ordinator of the University of Toronto's Child Care Resource and Research Unit and prominent child-care advocate. "The way the interests are being played off one another just illustrates it's not a fleshed-out discussion. It's so disheartening after all these years."

The issue hasn't been adequately discussed, says Kate Tennier, founder of Advocates for Child Care Choice, a grassroots organization lobbying against a national child-care system. "All the parties need to move beyond their sound bites and talk about how this fits into family policy in Canada."

From talking to lobbyists for child care and their counterparts on the side of stay-at-home parents, and all the researchers and policy wonks in between, it's clear there's a hunger for politicians to cool down, step back and help Canadians understand what we know and what we don't know, what we have and don't have.

What we don't have in 2006 is a clear commitment to young children in the form of a comprehensive family policy. At the federal level, there is the extended maternity and parental leave, the $5,000 Child Tax Benefit for all families with children, a maximum $7,000 per child tax deduction for those paying child-care expenses and additional benefits targeted at the poorest families -- all of which critics say must be increased significantly. There is some funding for child care, but it doesn't nearly approach the need. There is no baby bonus, no way to give parents who choose to stay home a significant financial acknowledgement for their sacrifice.

All of this plays out in an economy that is giving neither type of family a break.

"The only families keeping pace with inflation are middle-class families, and they are primarily dual-income families, many of whom face a crisis of caregiving," says Robert Glossop, formerly of the Vanier Institute of the Family. "At the same time, single wage-earner families feel hard done by because they can't keep up. The guy -- and most often it is the guy who has the job -- is not being paid enough to support his dependants."

Add it all up, and it's a piecemeal approach to developing a nation's next generation.

"The incoherence has led to one group of families feeling they're not acknowledged," says Mirabelli. "At the same time, the other group is saying 'We're working hard to make sure we can afford these kids and in order to do that, we need two incomes and to do that, we need somewhere safe to put the kids.'"

This tension puzzles Sheila Kamerman. A social work professor at Columbia University, Kamerman has done extensive research on child care and family policy in North America and Europe. She looks at Canada and sees a gaping hole where child care ought to be.

"It's interesting that Canada could be so generous with its parental leave policy and not recognize that when the child is one, the need for care does not end," says Kamerman. "What is a parent supposed to do when a baby is one year and one month old?

"It's probably the weakest part of Canadian child policy," Kamerman adds. "You have the child tax benefit, which is good policy, you have national health insurance, which we in this country often look at with envy, and you have an excellent parental leave policy. So at the level of health care and income support, you are really quite competitive with a number of other countries. But not on the early learning and child-care level. On that, you're even a bit behind the U.S."

Ouch.

Kamerman points out that Quebec is the exception; it has the most advanced system of child care in the country. Regardless of what you think of the direction it has taken (primarily funding centres, not home-based care), you have to admit it has made a systematic effort to address the issue of child care.

The rest of Canada doesn't come close. There is no central organization of child care at any level, whether municipal, provincial or federal. There is no system to ensure that however parents want to care for their children, they get help to do it. There is no mechanism to ensure that communities with a high demand for child care get what they need, or that caregivers are well-trained or that the care is good and safe. There is very little help for parents struggling to keep up with high fees, and even less financial support and services for parents who forgo paid work in favour of caring for their children themselves.

How did a society that prides itself on its social programs decide that the day-to-day care of hundreds of thousands of children was none of our business? When did we decide the state has no place in the romper rooms of the nation?

We didn't. There has been no national discussion, no reaching for a consensus. It's hard enough just having a private conversation about child care. Get a group of parents with young children in a room and ask them about child care, and it won't be long before voices are strained and backs are up. For good or ill, child care goes to the heart of how we are raising our children.

All the more astounding that, more than 30 years after women started to enter the workforce in ever-increasing numbers, we are no closer to agreeing how to take care of their children. Perhaps on some deep level, our leaders don't want to admit it's not a temporary phenomenon. But this isn't 1945: women are not going to suddenly start to leave the workforce in droves because the boys are home from the front.

Many women want to work, and many more can't afford not to. Neither could the country. The Vanier Institute of the Family calculates that if one parent in every two-income family were to stay home, the cost to federal and provincial tax revenues would be in the range of $35 billion a year.

It's a similar story across much of the industrialized world.

The difference is that while Canada has dithered about what to do for families, other countries have developed extensive efforts to help them cope, by expanding parental-leave provisions and child-care programs.

In the 1990s, while Canada was cutting back on social programs, many European countries were creating new ones to go beyond simply minding children to stimulating them, particularly preschoolers.

Driven by the growing body of research that points to the importance of the early years in cognitive and emotional development, they have invested heavily in programs that deliberately extend of the concept of public education down to the preschool years.

According to a 2001 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), access to early childhood education and care is a statutory right beginning at one year of age in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, at two years old in France. The general trend in western Europe is toward providing all children at least two years of free care before school begins. Even in individualistic, family-values America, there are widespread efforts to expand junior kindergarten across the country and introduce more preschool programs.

Canada has more junior kindergarten programs and drop-in centres than it used to, but not everywhere and not always full-day, leaving it to parents to find care for the rest of the day. Although even supporters said the money promised was not nearly enough, the Liberal child-care agreements (cancelled by the Harper government last month) were Canada's first significant steps toward creating comprehensive early learning and child-care programs.

"Relative to other countries of Europe, in terms of access, in terms of total investment, in terms of quality of staffing, we are behind. No question about it," says Abrar Hasan, a Canadian economist who directed the 12-country OECD study. "There is need for greater investment (in child care and early learning) almost everywhere, but Canada spends something like 0.1 per cent of GDP, which is almost half of the average of other OECD countries."

Why hasn't Canada jumped on the child-care bandwagon? At least in part because child care has, since its early days at the turn of the last century, occupied a deeply ambivalent place in our national psyche.

The earliest arrangements were creches and nurseries operated by society ladies for poor women forced by circumstance (widowhood or a layabout husband) to be in the paid labour force. While the service was much needed, the depth of the philanthropy was questionable; many of the nurseries also operated an employment service, providing the mothers with work as domestic help to their wealthy patrons.

It wasn't until the Second World War that it became socially acceptable for middle-class women to use child care. Rosie the Riveter and her sisters across North America needed someone to watch their children while they went into the factories. Governments made it easier by subsidizing nurseries, a necessary evil that was expected to end at the end of the war. Most programs were cancelled at war's end, but not without a battle from the working mothers, many of whom intended to stay on the job.

They did, organizing their own child care as they went along. Then their daughters and granddaughters came along and many more of them worked, too. Today, as in previous generations, parents make their own arrangements for care. Some work part-time, some have grandparents helping, some send the kids to a neighbour, others join a co-op or a private centre. The wealthy hire nannies, while the poor hope for some of the very limited subsidies. Those who want to and can afford to, stay home.

None of them get much help from the rest of us.

"Parents who have young children at home are never far from the awareness of how hard it is to make it all come together, but it's considered private and has rarely translated into what we call a public problem," says Susan Prentice, a historical sociologist at the University of Manitoba who has written about child care.

"Also, there's this long association of child-care services with charity and the needy and the poor. It has been stigmatized, and as a nation we haven't made that gestalt switch to thinking child care can be a good thing."

Yet figures from Statistics Canada show that the use of child care rose steadily through the 1990s across all demographic groups, whether the children have two parents or one, whether they're rich or poor, whether they live in the country or the city. It rose in spite of the fact that good child care is expensive and often hard to come by.

There's no reason to believe that trend will change anytime soon, especially if Ottawa's experience is anything to go by. Since January, staff at Child Care Information have been building a centralized waiting list for licensed child care in the city. Operated by the Andrew Fleck Child Care Service and funded by the city of Ottawa, it's the first city-wide list of its kind in Canada. Until now, the 195 centres and 16 licensed home-care agencies kept their own lists, and parents would put their children on numerous lists to increase their chances of getting a spot. That made for a lot of duplication and difficulty sorting fact from fiction when it came to assessing demand for care. Not any more.

The list won't officially launch until later this month, but already it has more than 5,180 children on it. Some 200 of those are babies not yet born -- their super-organized parents are trying to get a jump on the competition. No wonder: 2,098 of the names need a spot today. That's more than 2,000 children in Ottawa alone whose parents are waiting for a spot in a regulated child-care program, whether full-time or part-time, subsidized or not.

It's hard to know how long they'll wait. Anne Ricard, an information counsellor with the Andrew Fleck organization, says sometimes it's a couple of months, sometimes it takes two years. It depends on the age of the child, the availability of space in a given neighbourhood, or the popularity of the centre or agency the parents choose. The better the reputation, the greater the demand.

Which brings us to the issue of quality, another minefield in this debate. Before you can create a child-care program, you have to know what you want that care to achieve. Is child care primarily intended to enable more women to be in the workforce, by helping ensure their children are cared for when they're at work? Is it meant to give families more choices, between working and not working, full-time or part-time? Is it meant to prepare older children for school? Should parents be doing part or all of it, or should the job go to trained staff?

"When you look at what other countries are doing, you realize that they've been thinking about what they're trying to achieve," says Friendly. "This has not happened in Canada as a system, as a country."

The Martin government assumed Canadians saw a role for government in the provision of child care -- not an unreasonable assumption, given a 2003 study by the Vanier Institute of the Family that found almost three-quarters of Canadians believe the cost of child care should be shared by families and government.

The Liberals' $5-billion plan echoed the approach taken in Scandinavia: child care is meant to help working parents and develop "human capital" as early as possible.

In 2004, they pledged to send money to the provinces in return for a promise to begin building a national child-care system. Some funds were to go to programs that all families could use, such as drop-in centres, but the priority was to create licensed child-care spaces, and develop a system of what the Liberals referred to as "safe, secure regulated facilities, licensed instructors, and an emphasis on learning and development."

While the Liberals promised to continue increasing the Child Tax Benefit for all families, it was not a new program and it has received little attention. Stay-at-home parents saw little for their child-care needs in the Liberal plan.

With a promise to give families $1,200 for each child under the age of six and set aside funds for tax incentives to encourage businesses to open child-care spaces, the Conservative platform appeared to offer more to all parents, regardless of how they organize care. Since there is no requirement that the money be spent on child care, it amounts to a new family allowance payment, not an enhancement of options. It's a much-needed boost for families that no political party could attack, but also somewhat ironic; it was the Tories under Brian Mulroney who cancelled the old family allowance in 1993.

Calling the Conservative plan "choice in child care," however, is misleading. The payment is close to useless if nothing is done to improve the supply of care. The tax incentive approach proved a failure when Mike Harris tried it in Ontario; child-care advocates claim not a single space was created as a result.

"The Conservative plan bypasses government entirely and just gives everybody money to spend," says Prentice. "They're telling us all parents need is some cash, they don't need services. That's like saying 'Here's your share of the education budget -- go educate your kids. You don't need schools, you don't need teachers.'"

The Conservatives seem determined to leave the provision of child care up to the open market -- something that anyone looking for child care can tell you simply hasn't worked.

Still, the Harper government is unmoved.

"There have been many studies that show that the best people to raise children are the parents," said Diane Finley, minister of Human Resources and Social Development, in February -- the clear implication being that child care provided by anyone other than a parent is not just second-best, but ought not to be encouraged.

"Many parents profoundly want to stay home with their children, but that is very different than saying child care is bad for children," says Prentice. "One does not make the other one true."

All sides are guilty of massaging the debate to fit their purposes, and stay-at-home parents have justifiably bristled at the suggestion that "experts" in the child-care field know more about their children than they do. But the Conservatives have outdone everyone with their constant references to day cares as "institutionalizing" children, and suggestions that parents who use child care are not raising their children.

This is deeply troubling to Hasan of the OECD.

"There isn't enough discussion in Canada, and it is confused by the ideological ideas that somehow the state is going to interfere in private lives or take away prerogatives, when the whole issue is really about good, stimulating environments for children.

"Whether it is provided by parents if they want to do it themselves, that is quite a separate issue," Hasan says. "The issue is that these are very important years whose importance has not been fully recognized in terms of how to provide for their care and development."

What's stopping us from truly embracing several options and developing a strategy that addresses the needs of all families? What's wrong with being flexible and trying to reflect the way family life has changed in the last 50 years?

"Those who raise the next generation have expenses that others don't, and they need support," says Mirabelli. "We've lost sight of why kids matter. Kids matter because they give life to the society, and families are raising the people who will look after us in our old age.

"The question is, how is the nation-state going to support them? It's not doing a good job if it pits the interests of one kind of family against another."

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CHILD CARE BY THE NUMBERS

1,696,280: Number of children under four in Canada, according to StatsCan.

694,300: Number under four in Ontario.

750,000: Number of licensed child-care spaces in Canada as of 2003, 59 per cent more than in 1998. That's about double the number of licensed spaces in the early 1990s and seven times the number in the 1980s.

82: Per cent of licensed Canadian child-care spaces that are in day-care centres.

18: Per cent of licensed spots in family homes. The highest growth in recent years (54 per cent between 2001 and 2003) was in home day cares.

79: Per cent of day-care spaces in non-profit centres in 2003.

21: Per cent in commercial centres.

73: Per cent of all women with children under 16 living at home and were employed in 2004.

39: Per cent of all women in the workforce in 1976.

65: Per cent of Canadian women with children under three who were employed in 2004 -- that is more than double the number for women with children under three in 1976. 67 per cent of women with children under six were employed compared to 77 per cent of women whose youngest child was between six and 15.

Source: Statistics Canada, Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, 2006.