Beer and Popcorn…Er, no
One of the world’s most popular parenting gurus is to warn that placing children younger than three in nurseries risks damaging their development.The principle difference between the Liberal’s childcare plan and the Conservatives is that the Conservatives allows for the possibility that mum might be the best childcare provider for very young children. The poor Liberals, needed to think of something else for the state to do, could not admit this might be the case.Steve Biddulph, whose books have sold more than 4m copies worldwide, says that instead of subsidising nurseries, which do a “second-rate” job, the government should put in place policies to enable mothers to stay at home with their babies.
The advice signals a reversal of views for Biddulph, an Australian with more than 20 years’ experience as a therapist, whose previous bestsellers
include Raising Boys and Raising Girls.In his new book Biddulph will admit he has changed his mind because of growing evidence of increased aggression, antisocial behaviour and other problems among children who have spent a large part of their infancy being cared for away from home.
He argues that such children may have problems developing close relationships later.
times of london
Here’s why: the “hidden agenda” of the Liberal Party (and the NDP) has been to “empower” women to work outside the home. While this has been done in the name of feminism it has also had the consequence of allowing a rapid expansion of the workforce. It has also had the largely unntended consequence of reducing the number of hours children spend with their parents, particularily their mothers.
This was an experiment in child rearing without precedent and undertaken simultanously through most of the West. The hope was that children raised by stangers would have much the same outcomes as those raised by their mothers.
To no one’s great surprise the research – such as that cited by Biddulph – is rapidly accumulating suggesting that subcontracting childrearing does not work.
From a child development perspective this cannot come as much of a shock. In fact, development specialists have been split for a long time as to anyone other than mum caring for young children; but working mums were consoled with what turns out to have been rather bogus research suggeesting that the outcomes for daycare babies and kids raided by mum were, more or less, the same. It turns out they weren’t.
Poor, dumb, Paul Martin in full pander to the professional day care lobby, drank this kool aid and got onboard the whole jobs for the boys (well, girls, actually) national daycare bandwagon.
The altenative is simply beyond the capacity of the politically correct, 80’s feminist mindset which drive the Liberals and the NDP. Yup, it looks like it is better for children for mum to take a few years out of the workforce.
This has huge political, economic and social implications. The most significant of them being that if we want healthy, well developed kids, we are going to have to accept a shift of resources from taxpayers without children to taxpayers with children. Or, and this would be my preferred solution, the reduction of taxes across the board with a coresponding reduction in governmental activity.
In many ways creating a child friendly, family friendly society is the challenge Western governments face in the next few decades. Somehow, as societies, we have to get out birthrates back up to replacement rate or our culture will simply die out. The daycare driven, one and two child families which are stand issue for many in the West are not getting that job done. Thinking seriously about how to raise the birthrate, starting with giving stay at home mums support through three or four children, would be a start.
Hey now. You promised there was no social re-engineering in all this. You promised. So now it isn’t that day care is inefficient and unfair but it is actually harmful? Man, Paul Martin was really really evil, then, for creating day care. Thanks for clearing this up.
You’ll have to pardon me if I’m not so enthusiastic about using the government as a vehicle of social engineering, especially with something so important as the family and childrearing. I’m fine with giving tax breaks to people who have children and otherwise not doing things to actively impede people from from forming families, but beyond that what constructive role could the government possibly have?
The demographic trends are only a problem because of welfare state programs that can nolonger be paid for once the retiree/worker ratio hits a certain point. But the obvious solution there is to cut those programs to something more austere. Other than that, this idle talk of “raising the birth rate” is a lot like “raising the consumption rate”—it’s a value judgement disguising itself as analysis, and doesn’t take seriously the idea that maybe people don’t want to consume as much or have as many children. Or have you just taken off your libertarian hat altogether for this post and put on your conservative one?
Another thing: while I’m obviously no friend of national daycare, I’m not sure how convinced I am with regard to the effects of daycare versus mommycare. On the one hand, basic genetic and economic logic would suggest that daycare workers have significantly less motivation to take good care of kids than their biological parents do and will probably not do as good of a job.
On the other hand, Judith Rich Harris has argued in The Nurture Assumption, I think convincingly, that family environment accounts for approximately zero percent of variance in personality, intelligence and social outcomes among children, and that peer environment matters much more. (Provided, of course, that one’s parents aren’t egregiously abusive or grossly neglectful screwups.)
There may be a way to reconcile these two points of view, but I’m not sure yet.
Matt, well, if I really wanted to go all tory I would be advocating actually paying parents to have extra kids.
The interesting issue is that while any given family may want to have a certain number of kids, in aggregate those decisions make the difference between a culture surviving or not. And part of that decision matrix is the way in which we value – or devalue – families.
My argument is that, for a variety of reasons ranging from “have it all feminism” through to massive government expansion, the largely Liberal agenda for the past three decades has been to encourage women to work and to effectively penalize families with only one wage earner.
People respond to incentives and the birthrate fell. I don’t think this is a good thing.
You are quite right that the correct solution to the problem is to reduce the size and scope of government so that taxes can fall (once we pay down the debt). However, a necessary first step in any such program is to step back from introducing any new programs.
Which, Alan, leads me to your point: looks like the evidnece is pointing in the intuitively rather attractive direction that kids raised by mum tend to have fewer problems and better development outcomes than kids raised by strangers. Which provides a dandy rationale not to be lashing out federal dollars on childcare spaces.
Matt, I am inclined to have a lot of time for Harris’ work as she actually looks at how kids function.But I don’t think that her work contradicts the anti-daycare pro-mum care position. Rather, it may go some distance towards buttressing it. Kids in a daycare are basically dropped in with their peers at 6 mos or two or what have you. Those peers will tend to have much more influence if the child is in daycare than if the intereactions are less formalized and are mediated by attentive parents.
Peer influence is incredibly strong and it is not altogether beneficial. Mediating that influence for a few years is likely to give a child the capacity to pick and chose which of his or her peers’ behaviour will guide his or her conduct.
It is rather like the issue which people raise with homeschoolers: “What about socialization?” Th right answer is that the sorts of socialization one sees in elementarty and secondary schools is not an unalloyed good. In fact, with the rise of hip hop culture and convicts as role models it would seem rather sensible to limit children’s exposure to unfettered socialization. It is not likely to do them any more harm than an uninterupted diet of gangsta rap will.
We were twisted as we raised our kids but ran a day care. We didn’t want to but Liberals kept coming to the door making us.
Hard to argue with a Liberal bearing an envelope full of cash…
20 dollars a day…who could resist?
One of the reasons birthrates have fallen in western countries is that virtually all of the benefits of children have been eliminated, but most of the costs remain. It is no longer necessary to have children to assist with the family farm or enterprise or to assure the parents of old age care. It is good that we no longer have to rely on children as a source of labour and that’s not a road down which we should retreat, but we haven’t addressed the cost side well.
Fortunately there are people who desire children for their own sake, as well as some who feel compelled by their belief systems to have children. Collectively they are not necessarily people who want to institutionalize their children from a very young age. Some of those people don’t want the solutions the state provides. The imbalances against single-income two-parent families are the strongest ones which require redress.
“the benefits of children have been eliminated”
This isn’t entirely true. Your children will eventually make an income (we hope) and pay taxes to the gov’t so that the gov’t can take care of you (we hope). The benefits of children have not been eliminated. It is that the benefits of children are no longer directly felt.
I have serious doubts that a state funded daycare program will have a significant impact on birth rates. I suspect the number of children a family has is a more often a matter of desire rather than cost. Though I have no data to back this up.
I prefer to call it outsourcing, rather than sub-contracting, parental childcare responsibilities. It really is no different than companies outsourcing various functions which leftists tend to rail against.
What’s good for the goose…
what gets me as a stay at hime mom is that bag of cash given to ne if i leave my children…i pay for other parents to have 2 incomes when my family only has one!
the liberals started this when they put daycare on a pedisal and parenting at the bottom.
a mom who works at home is equal to a mom who works at a paying job! (same as dads)
y pay one and not the other?
or
y pay either?
am i a leech on society for childcaring my own 3 kids?
i am paid well if i daycare someone elses 3 children…. go figure eh
(sry bout typing i have a fractured wrist)
Sara, one of the best parts of the whole childcare argument is the one you hit..if you take care of your own kids you make no money and get no tax breaks. But if you and your neighbour swap kids and pay each other you make money and get benefits and tax deductions.
The classic here being that if my partner had paid a friend to care for our older child and in return been paid to care for that friends’ child she would ahve been eligible for EI maternity benefits for our second. She didn’t and it cost us. In my view this is entirely absurd and needs to be fixed.
i have 3 kids when do i have time for myself let alone my neighbirs kids on top of that…. the system does suck
The overarching question in the coming childcare debate is what, if any, interest does the state have in the fate of its families and their children? Put another way, to what end is childcare the means?
And pay taxes, You know this is net negative for the individuals right?
children are to come first with parents, but in the hands of the government they are to come second to money…
that is not how parents raise their children