FastLittleArticle

The Georgia Straight, the local entertainment weekly that stays true to its hippie-underground roots by including a longer researched piece each issue, obliged me by putting daycare on its cover this week. This is not something I have any personal experience with, due to a pig-headed and possibly self-defeating refusal to participate in the mainstream job market. (Actually, it’s more complicated than that – I’m not sure I’d have even the slightest idea how to get a normal job at this point.) But daycare was a prominent part of the recent election in Canada. Columnists tried to arouse our indignation with stories of high income earners who use Quebec’s famous $7 a day daycare program. Or they tried to stir our sympathy with stories of ordinary folks – you know, people like you – struggling to find adequate and affordable care.

The Straight’s article is unusual in that it raises (and then dismisses) the possibility that the difficulty of finding childcare is behind our low birth rates. The mothers interviewed all say they would consider having more children if more quality child care were available. But pro-natalist policies have had no measurable effect on birth rates anywhere they have been introduced. Common wisdom has it that we have smaller families because we are more financially secure. David Baxter, of Vancouver’s Urban Futures Institute, told the Straight, “As soon as a country has a pension plan, you don’t need kids anymore. Societies have high birth rates where people need the next generation of workers, where kids will look after you when you’re old.” This is too pat an explanation for such a profound social change. Family size has been declining for a century (or more, in some places), with the obvious exception of the postwar baby boom. This decline predates the pension, the entry of large numbers of women into the labour force, and the social acceptability of contraception. What it is coincident with is the sharp increase in life expectancy in the wealthier parts of the world. People have stopped having large families because they can reasonably expect two healthy pregnancies to lead to two healthy grown children. It is in the parts of the world where the future is far less assured that birth rates tend to be high (Russia is a notable exception). Since those in the more fortunate parts of the world expect to live until their eighties, there is no particular reason to begin having babies until they are in their late 20s or 30s, which puts a further constraint on family size.

As smaller families become more common, larger families are left first to the rural, and then to the poor, aboriginals on reserve, and religious conservatives. This in turn will reinforce the decision of the middle class to limit family size (or not to have children at all). It is only among a more upscale demographic that three kids seems to be more ordinary, or even (as I recently heard), “four is the new three.” Nevertheless, birth rates are at near record lows. (You only think there’s a baby boom because a very rapid fashion cycle and steadily decreasing retail costs has resulted in the aggressive expansion of maternity shops.)

But even as we have fewer children, we have greater expectations for them, and daycare is a frequent topic of public discussion despite a smaller number of small people. With the election of a minority Conservative government, Canadians with children under the age of six can expect a cheque for $1200 per child per year. This would cover (at typical city prices) something like six weeks of daycare. It is also taxable in the hands of the lower-income parent. (Hey, that’s me! That might double my income!) This is widely taken as proof of Conservative hypocrisy: it is not to help parents who need daycare, but rather an attempt to answer a long-standing dissatisfaction of the social conservatives who have supported Prime Minister Harper. They have repeatedly argued that the tax deductibility of child care expenses leaves them doubly disadvantaged – they give up one income to keep mama with the kiddos, and they receive no encouragement to do so through the tax code.

Careful – we’re entering the mother wars here, a nasty internecine conflict which holds that any misstep stamps on your child’s forehead: FUTURE POET - BASICALLY UNEMPLOYABLE. I have often wondered why we even bother having a debate over publicly-funded daycare. The territory is so pocked with land mines like private choice (the women in the Straight article cite the high cost of buying a house in Vancouver as a critical part of their decisions to keep working) and public benefit (who’s going to pay your pension if we don’t secure the next generation’s future?) that it would be best if we could just ditch the whole debate.

Why don’t we just put these kids in school? Start with junior kindergarten, as Ontario has done (with interruptions), and move back from there. It’s unlikely that we would start sending six-month-olds to school, but even schooling beginning at three would be an enormous improvement on the current situation. No pointless bickering over selfish mothers who work to pay for a fancier house or yearly tropical vacations, since no one (apart from the homeschooling minority) argues that children are better off with their mothers than in school.

Private daycare will never be sufficient to meet demand, because we will never have enough people willing to work for the low wages necessary to make daycare inexpensive enough for people to use it in exchange for a moderate income. (Think daycare is expensive now? Try paying for it when professionally trained caregivers start demanding more than $22 000 a year.)

Of course, education is an area of provincial jurisdiction. The federal government has a history – especially recently – of muscling in on provincial territory, grabbing what glory and power it can. But this doesn’t explain why lobbyists have concentrated their efforts at the national level, particularly given that the provinces are responsible for daycare standards and licensing. Why not lobby for junior kindergarten? Public education is an existing universal delivery system. Why the blind spot?

According to Abbie Gordon Klein, in The Debate Over Child Care, 1969-1990, this blindness has its source in the “age-old rift between the social welfare profession with its predominant social service function and the education profession with its social role as mass educator.” Contemporary daycare evolved from the day nurseries of the early 20th century, which were more like charities than they were like schools. In a history of Canadian daycare, Donna Varga writes, “All the nurseries operated in the poorest districts of their cities, their purpose being the care of children whose mothers had to engage in paid labour in order for their families to survive.” Daycares expanded with the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the workforce, but they remained institutionally separate from the public schools.

The attempts of daycares to play up their educational role (the certification programs are in Early Childhood Education, or ECE) have not been successful. Although we all agree that small children need quality care, we do not call daycare schooling – we call it daycare. The word itself emphasizes the idea that institutional care for these children is a private choice, unlike schooling, which is mandatory.

Kindergartens began as private institutions, but with a couple of important differences: they were originally a luxury for the well-off, much like prestigious preschools are today, and they always presented themselves as educational institutions, with a definite curriculum. Daycare, by contrast, remains a patchwork system, and thus is much more difficult to graft onto public schools. However, it’s certainly not impossible. In many parts of the world, children may enter school at the age of three.

Hey, lobbyists: your arguments are tiresome, and they have been unsuccessful for more than thirty years now. Let’s just skip the boring argument about where women (and it’s always women) should be while their children are young. Put those kids in school. “But what do I do before they are 3?” you ask. “And what can the feds take credit for?” I hear from the national policy wonks. How about this: Canada has an excellent parental leave program (it is unavailable to the self-employed, but never mind – I get to take advantage of it vicariously). How about we extend that legislation from one year of public benefits (topped up at your employer’s sometimes cheapskated discretion) to allow an extra year of unpaid leave. Your job would be safe. (Your mortgage payments in Vancouver might be a problem, as for the women interviewed in the Straight, but it is not the government’s job to help you out here any more than the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation already does.) Now you have to deal with a year on your own. Or maybe you’ve got another child on the way. In any case, it’s a whole lot better than what we have now, so kwitcher whining about having to deal with a single year of daycare. It was your choice to have kids, wasn’t it? Whoops – pardon me, that’s not the kind of thing I usually say. Reading what others have had to say about daycare must have left me vulnerable to the contagion of treating life as a series of consumer decisions. I promise it won’t happen again.

Posted by Katharine on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 10:09 pm.