Re: Whether Daycare is like Medicare?Mr. Martin has been hoodwinked by the daycare lobby which his government alas also funds, to use their research only, their venues only and their language even and I think he has been seriously misled.
1. To build a national ‘system’ for daycare, an infrastructure, and to say it is like building a health care system is a flawed argument. Hospitals are an urgent need for all of us from time to time and a universal risk we all share under an insurance plan. By contrast having children is voluntary and care of them is an ongoing legal responsibility, not sudden. The urgency of the crisis is not nearly parallel. (The daycare movement likes to create the myth of urgency but in fact there are vacancies at many daycares and the wait lists are actually lists of the same children on several lists, some children not yet born. There is no urgency. There are parents who suddenly need help with the child but daycare is not an urgent’ need’- care of the child is. And this could be met by funding so the parent could find a sitter, take time from paid work, or fund upfront a dayhome or daycare setting of their choice. In other words even when there is a crisis, the answer is not necessarily daycare.)
2. Hospitals have a recognized field of expertise about healing, vastly superior to that of the general public and nurture and highly pay highly trained experts. Daycares do not have any greater expertise than do ordinary parents and many international human rights charters actually defend the parent as the ultimate expert in determining what is best for the child. Daycares are substitutes for parental care, and they can be good but the parents are the original. To claim the substitute is the only expert is flawed.
3. Building a system that some may use in emergency is a good idea but even hospitals are finding that they can’t afford housing all patients there and there is a move to save money by allowing and enabling home-based care of the sick and frail. Daycare is moving however in the other direction to have more and more institutional care which in fact is counter-intuitive because it is very costly.
4. Hospitals are run as institutions of social well-being and funded by the state in the public interest. Daycares by contrast are actually a business, an industry offering a service much more akin to the restaurant industry. All people need to eat but you can choose whether to eat Italian, Chinese or vegan food. It is true all children need care but parents should be able to choose strict or lenient, religious or secular, sports, arts, music based or whatever as their culture and values permit. Hospitals can offer a one-size fits all because there is an agreed and scientifically validated way to a cure, but daycares have no such track record of being the only way to teach a child to tie his shoelaces or use a potty or talk.
When the daycare movement asks us to fund a system, to fund an infrastructure, this is a business model argument, arguing in effect that we must build up for more and more customers until ultimately everybody buys the product. The agenda of hospitals is to keep people out of hospital, by helping them live healthily. The agenda of daycares is to move more and more people into the daycare so more staff earn more money and have guaranteed jobs for life. It is quite a different agenda.
5.At hospitals the highest paid staff are the ones who do the most intricate care of the patient- the surgeons, the specialist doctors. At daycares by contrast the highest paid staff are the managers, inspectors, Centre directors and those who do not spend any time at all with children –hence again a business model instead of a social benefit model.
6. Mr. Martin may be trying to say that early learning is like Medicare, a universal good. That is true. But early learning happens wherever the child is. You can’t keep a child from learning; they are born ready to learn. And care of a child by a 3rd party stranger has not proven track record of being superior to care by a loving parent. Even if we are kind and say that strangers can be as skilled as parents are in noticing the skills, interests and attention span of a child, the stranger is certainly not better at it than is the parent. So if Mr. Martin wants to fund early learning he should fund it wherever it happens – and it happens wherever the child is. To fund the child, not the daycare would be a wonderful and fair social program. To fund only the daycare is highly flawed. In the education movement we are moving to recognize home-schooling and are giving parents many new options of choice including telelearning, and specialty schools for arts, sports, national history, women’s issues, ballet etc. If we are empowering parents and funding the child for education, surely it is only logical to empower parents and fund the child for ‘early education”
Daycare is not a social program like Medicare.
Now care of children, yes, that is. Care of children is vital to the nation and all care of children, wherever it happens, must be valued so that all kids are valued. A truly universal permanent commitment to children is vitally needed but it is only logically made if we fund the child, not the daycare. Daycare is only one of many locations for excellent learning and care.
Beverley Smith
editor
Recent Research on Caregiving
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