Substitute the government for the bored bloke, and the country’s working mothers for the eager mum obsessed with just one topic, and you’ve a neat picture of our attitude to the issue of childcare. Earlier this year it was Groundhog Day for government canvassers during the by-elections in Kildare and Meath. Over and over again they must have felt they were meeting the same harassed working mother banging on about the same subject. When are you people going to do something about the cost, availability and quality of childcare? And their candidates must have been browned off trotting out the same lines — major initiatives on the way, working group report coming, increased expenditure promised — to voters who had heard it all before.
If you don’t have children, their care must indeed be the most tedious subject under the sun. If you do, it is uppermost in your mind. Should you go to work, farm your kids out to strangers, commute at ungodly hours to earn enough money to pay a childminder? Or would you go off your rocker if you stayed home all day? The opposition parties have identified childcare as one of the big issues for the next general election. So last week Michael McDowell, the justice minister, set out a plan to tackle at least one aspect of the problem: after-school care. An economic study has identified those three or four hours after school ends and before a parent’s workday finishes as being the main obstacle to a larger workforce. Women, in other words, are spending unproductive hours at home when they could be out satisfying the demands of the labour market, all because they have to collect their children from school.
Small wonder, then, that this window of missed opportunity is the first to be targeted by the government, which has a plan to provide facilities for kids to stay on in school premises until about 7pm.
From the point of view of a working parent with school-going children, it is an attractive proposition. But it raises a question on which we’d probably rather not dwell: exactly who is childcare really about? We can go on about how all the government really cares about is getting women back to work, and how they don’t really give a hoot about the best interests of the children missing their mammies and daddies for most of the day. We can complain that the pressure to address the childcare issue is being applied far more forcefully by big business than by parents, and that’s the only reason the government is listening. But it’s disingenuous to imply that we’re being forced out to work in our droves by cruel, callous individualisation and evil childcare incentives just to satisfy the suits.
The reality, according to figures from the Central Statistics Office, is that 90% of working mothers want to keep on working — only one in 10 women would like to pack it all in and be their children’s full-time carers. Once we concede that we are working because we want to, a little more reality may enter the debate. But that doesn’t mean the government’s objective ought to be to get every available woman out to work. Acknowledging children’s rights to the best possible care is just as valuable an investment in the country’s economic future.
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Some European countries have already recognised this and are trying different methods of balancing the child’s requirements with those of a parent who wants to work. Norway offers “cash for care” payments to stay-at-home mothers, but it is criticised as regressive because it is seen as encouraging mothers to stay at home. Working mothers get a year’s maternity leave on 80% pay, or 42 weeks on full pay, and fathers get a month’s paid leave.
German children between three and six have a right to a full-time kindergarten place and the state pays 80% of the cost, while the most popular form of childcare is a “day mother” costing €5 an hour. In France, parents are reimbursed for lost income if they care for their kids at home, or else they can turn to a childminder whose fees are almost entirely paid by the state. Once they’re potty trained, children can go to a free kindergarten. By comparison, McDowell ’s plan to use school premises for afternoon childcare looks pretty Neanderthal.
All the opposition parties are keen to emphasise choice in their childcare programmes. The Greens propose financial benefits that would give one parent the option of staying at home. Labour is demanding a €1 billion childcare investment, including subsidies, as its price to enter a coalition. But the reality is that, once in government, all parties will be faced with the imperative of keeping the economy ticking over with a strong and educated workforce. Parties are almost certain to conclude that truly child-centered care is a luxury they can’t afford in the short term.
The snag, though, is that policies that don’t meet parents’ demands are doomed to fail in the long term. For all the enthusiasm of women for the workplace, very few would consider it worth the cost of their children’s misery in an inadequate care environment.
Ironically, a childcare formula that truly did prioritise children, and their relationship with their parents, would pay dividends in the end. In France, parents can take up to three years of unpaid leave, with a guaranteed option to return to their job afterwards. Initially, no doubt, there would be squeals of horror from the business community here, but such a strategy could work on several levels. It would provide short-term employment options for a younger workforce, allow small children the stabilising influence of their parents’ attention in their formative years, and retain the expertise of experienced workers who might otherwise burn out after a few fraught years of juggling toddlers and jobs.
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Boring but true: if you put the investment and imagination into the childcare issue now, you really will reap the benefits in the future. But maybe not in time for the next election, and that seems to be all that matters.