Is Child Care Your Problem or Our Problem?
I was in the doctor’s office today, waiting with a sleeping baby for his four-month checkup, and came across an interesting article in the March 2012 issue of Canadian Family.
The article was about Canada’s lack of a national child-care program, where “lack” means we’re tied with Ireland for last place out of 24 economically advanced countries in early childhood education and care, according to a 2008 UN report called The Child Care Transition.
What’s interesting is that in Canada, child care is thought of as a private individual problem, and not a structural one. (That assumption represents a basic assumption of the economic story, of course, where people are understood primarily as individuals and not as group members with group responsibilities.) That means that some people argue that those who decided to have children are the ones who ought to pay for them.
Nancy Folbre, a nonmarket economist who looks at work that isn’t directly paid for and so is hard to price, is the author of The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. She points out that people used to raise children who then went to work for the family. In that kind of situation, the “private problem” of child care at least stays in the family - meaning that the time and effort you put into raising your children has a chance to come back to you, so to speak.
But today, Folbre says, we tend to raise children who grow up and go to work for someone else. She says, “Parents subsidized capitalists, producing workers that employers could hire without paying the actual cost of producing and training them.”
The author of the magazine piece, Ann Douglas, argues that child care is a social responsibility, like education and health care, because society has a vested interest in quality care.
So two things -
First, given that our kids are going to grow up to become solid members of society (or not) and good contributors in that society (or not), even if you think the issue of child care should be handled privately, the issue will eventually become societal. If you create low quality child care that is damaging to the child, those “private” problems will eventually become societal problems as the child moves from the family out into the world. And by then it’s probably a tremendous amount of work to do much about it.
And second, lest we still think that fields like education are still perceived as social goods, the argument that public goods are actually private goods is also happening in those arenas. There, the argument underlying the withdrawal of government support is that those who benefit from education personally should pay for it personally, which sees dwindling government dollars, deregulation of professional programs like law and medicine, rising tuition rates, and greater access to student debt (personal debt) to pay for the whole thing. And that goes against the idea we once had that educated citizens are good for our society as a whole, which is why we once supported education with public tax dollars to begin with.
So - what we’re really up against with the child care policy debate is what we’re up against with the education policy debate, and any number of other policy debates; namely, the larger cultural trend that sees the assumptions of the economic story taking hold across so many of our institutions and undermining our other values.
Ann’s article ends with a quote from someone who hits the crux of the problem exactly: “‘We need to ask ourselves ‘What kind of country do we want to be?’ A question like ‘What is Canada’s place in the world?’ is very much related to whether Canadian parents get good child care.”
And, I would add, that question is very much related to whether Canadians get high quality, publicly supported education, and high quality, publicly supported health care too.
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