Choosing the right child care is one of the most fraught decisions modern parents face: Should one of us stay home and forgo a salary? Should we choose the government-stamped daycare or the family-run one around the corner? Can we afford a nanny?
Now, British parenting guru Penelope Leach steps into the breach with her recently published book, Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone. But despite her reputation for offering comforting advice to freaked-out new parents, don't look to her for easy answers here. The revered psychologist puts all the options under a ruthless microscope and exposes many uncomfortable truths in her examination of care in Canada, the United States, Britain and Europe, including the fact that much of the child care parents pay for in North America is dismal. The Globe and Mail talked to Dr. Leach about her findings.
In North America we're so entrenched in debates on what's best: being a stay-at-home mother, using a nanny or using a daycare.
There are a lot of things wrong with that debate. One is that idea that the only alternative to poor child care is no child care. In other words, if you can't find child care that is absolutely perfect for your child then you ought to stay home. To me the debate is, if you can't find child care that you reckon is good for your child, how can we make it good? We're still looking backwards, with rose-tinted spectacles, back to the postwar years. An awful lot of people still believe, sometimes rather secretly, that in an ideal world mothers would stay home with their children until they went to school. I don't think we live in that world any more.
Two things make me angry.
One, for a parent, usually a mother, who positively wants to stay home, whether indefinitely or right now or for a bit longer, to have to go back to the workplace is disgraceful. Because it doesn't actually save society any money. And it doesn't actually save the couple any money, and the evidence is women do infinitely better in the business of balancing child care and home if they're able to do what feels right to them. The other thing that makes me cross is that we know quite a lot about what high-quality child care is for different children at different ages. And we don't do it because it costs money.
We know that a high ratio of adults to children is good for them. What else do we know?
It's not as if any old adult will do. By the time you're 2½ you can do with fewer people, but they have to be trained. It isn't as good by then just to have someone who is warm and cuddly and well-meaning. If you're going to be in a group, you need to be in a group that, if not run by a teacher, that's very closely supervised by a teacher. Being assigned to a key worker is crucial. Again, it isn't enough to just have a lot of adults looking after everybody. ... If you treat children like cans of baked beans, they'll feel they're cans of baked beans.
So, continuity is crucial?
The staff replacement rate in child care is 30, even 50, per cent, which means that a child will be lucky to have some key person even for a year in one room, let alone his (whole) time in a nursery. Why? These terribly important people who are so very vital to our children are paid less than a housekeeper, less than a gardener. It's crazy how contradictory we are in what we say matters and what we actually do.
So, how do we raise those standards?
We really need to fund it the way we fund every other kind of education. We couldn't get quality kindergarten if we said, 'Well, parents who want it will have to pay for it.' In the same way, group child care and early education needs to be at least partly funded by the taxpayer. And if North Americans are going to get on their high horses and say, 'Why should I pay for other people's children?' one has to look them in the eye and say, 'Why should other people's children fund your pension?'
