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On 5 February, Labor introduced its foreshadowed bill to spend billions more on childcare. Late at night on 13 February, the Senate passed the Government’s bill.

The Coalition opposed it, arguing against the removal of the activity test that was designed to ensure that the primary carer is doing some paid work or approved volunteer work to receive certain childcare subsidies.

“This is the single, biggest investment by an Australian government ever in new childcare services,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a speech in the Greens-held electorate of Griffith in Brisbane last December.

The package fully subsidises up to three days or 30 hours for all families, scraps the activity test, and increases childcare worker wages by 15 per cent over three years.

Labor has promised – if it is re-elected – a new billion-dollar fund aimed at constructing more rural and regional childcare centres. It claims that 100,000 families will financially benefit from the free childcare.

Parents’ Preference

It is hard to tell what your average mum and dad think about this new spending on childcare. Without some fresh and comprehensive polling, we could assume that, for those parents heavily relying on outsourced childcare, every new dollar of subsidy is a welcome one. But how many parents would prefer more time at home with their one to three-year-olds, and less hours in paid work, if it was financially feasible?

We have to go back to a large 2009 study from Britain to get a reliable insight into parents’ preferences. Cristina Odone’s study, “What Women Want”, clearly showed a strong preference for avoiding paid work when there were two children under five in the family. It showed that the vast majority of parents wanted flexibility and no coercion about childcare choices, and that only a small percentage – less than 12 per cent – preferred paid work to minding young children.

If we step back for context to Labor’s increased spending, we can see how we got here. Australia first began subsidies for daycare in 1972. Since then, mainly Labor feminists and neo-liberal types have shaped and expanded the subsidy schemes.

What has changed over the decades is Labor moving from schemes that punish mothers not in paid work, and reward mothers who are, to the ideological goal of providing universal free childcare for all. That is, regardless of the parents’ work status – paid or unpaid.

There are a few winners out of all this. We have the childcare industry itself, predominately made up of private for-profit centres making big profits due to this direct subsidy. A number of current and former politicians are owners or part-owners of these profit-making centres.

Then there is the upper echelon of childcare industry workers: the experts, the academics, the lobbyists and the senior managers who oversee the over $12 billion that this industry sucks up annually from taxpayers.

There is also the Labor-aligned United Voice union (now merged with the National Union of Workers to form the United Workers Union) that directly benefits from every wage rise that Labor has given to childcare workers.

Stranger Care

The losers are the children. And this is the key point. Childcare – euphemistically entitled “early education – is simply babysitting for zero-to-four-year-olds by strangers.

It has been proven to cause harm to children in a “dosage”-like pattern, according to a major 14-year longitudinal study in the United States by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Early Child Care Research Network. The longer the hours, and more frequent use, the more problem behaviours manifest down the track.

A generation ago, most mums would intuitively be cautious – or at least sceptical – about long, frequent use of stranger care for toddlers. Today this is not so, as the industry and ideological feminists have worked tirelessly to dress up stranger care in groups as “educational” and “school preparation” and denounced detractors. One trick they used was to decontextualise and over-emphasise evidence that children from particularly poor and sub-optimal homes were measurably better off in a daycare environment.

Over recent decades, Australia has from time to time heard from experts in psychology and parenting warning us about the potential harms, but these voices are quickly mocked and blocked.

Recently, Dr Erica Komisar made waves for saying the same thing. Stranger care for zero-to-three-year-olds is harmful. But a lie repeated often enough, funded directly by government, becomes “truth”.

In summary, both Coalition and Labor governments are responsible for creating and growing an enormous honey pot, which is so well-funded and so ubiquitous that few parents can avoid using it, even if they know it is sub-optimal or harmful.

What can be done about this?

We need to encourage honest, perhaps painful conversations about the harms of long or frequent use of stranger care for zero-to-three-year-olds. We need conferences, books, podcasts and debates about optimal child development, and education about developmental milestones.

Policies that direct money or tax relief to parents directly should be encouraged as this empowers parental choice over government coercion. For-profit childcare centres should be slowly phased out, so that in future only not-for-profit centres can receive government subsidies.

Finally, grandparents have a crucial role in encouraging new parents to stick it out and persist through the difficult but wonderful stages of parenting newborns and toddlers. After all, it is a precious time that parents and children never get back.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.