Time to put the brakes on nationalized daycare

Since last spring the government has been implementing, almost by stealth and without serious debate, its daycare agenda. But the case for institutional daycare is weak at best. At worse it’s based on bad science and outright deception.

There is no long term study supporting the position that institutional daycare is good for children. Studies that daycare advocates often use to prove it is, in fact do no such thing.

An example of one such study – the Carolina Abecedarian Project – concluded, among other things, that children who participated in the program had “higher cognitive test scores from the toddler years to age 21” and completed more years of college than those who did not participate.

But as Helen Ward, president of Kids First Canada points out in a recent editorial, what daycare advocates don’t say is that this was primarily an intervention project. Its participants, children of “desperately impoverished mothers with very low IQs,” were all but re-parented. Was the project and others like it successful? Statistically speaking, and in context, yes, but that hardly qualifies them as evidence that universal institutional daycare is good for children in all, or even most, cases.

Another problem is that advocates for institutional daycare focus on children’s ‘academic achievement’ as the sole criterion by which the success or failure of a program is assessed, ignoring evidence of serious emotional consequences. But surely the emotional wellbeing of our children is as important as scoring two or three percentage points higher on test scores?

Perhaps the biggest problem with the research, however, is the lack of a controlled, longitudinal study comparing ‘best practices’ in-home care with that of government funded institutional daycare. In the absence of such research, a universal, state-run daycare initiative amounts to nothing more than an experiment in social engineering, with our children cast in the role of laboratory mice.

This past spring the non-partisan Vanier Institute for the Family released a poll indicating 90 percent of Canadians, including a surprising 91 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 35, believe that, in two-parent situations, ideally, one parent should stay home and take primary responsibility for raising children. Institutional daycare ranked fifth as the preferred choice of Canadians for child-care behind, in order of preference, parent, grandparent, other relative and finally, in-home care by someone not related to the children.

Clearly Canadians continue to regard the family as the best place for rearing children. It’s not unreasonable then, to expect that they would also prefer family-friendly policies, such as tax cuts, to form the basis the government’s child-welfare policy instead of daycare. Instead they’re getting a program purporting to fill a need that bad government tax policy is creating in the first place. Is that sensible?

Another reason our government seems determined to ignore Canadians and forge ahead with its plan may be the belief that such a program will, in the long run, benefit the economy. According to economists Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky, the program is necessary because “it costs too much not to have (mothers of young children) working.”

Even the Prime Minister is climbing aboard the economic benefit bandwagon. In a speech to senior public servants on September 21, Paul Martin confirmed that “the (daycare) program we’re creating with the provinces and territories… primarily it’s about development and learning during the crucial time in life when potential is most readily nurtured…” He cites China as an example of a country that has successfully transformed itself and with whom we are now competing “in a race for the top”.

Mr. Martin expresses his belief that “when future generations look back they will recognize in our pan-Canadian approach to early learning, a project of nation-building in the same sense as universal medicare.”

So let’s get this straight. Our government is relying on flawed, incomplete and inconclusive research that ignores the emotional damage to children - to justify a program modeled on a healthcare system that is so broken that patients routinely die waiting for unavailable treatment - in order to emulate a society that persecutes religious minorities and jails political dissidents, and that practices compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as population control measures – all so that our GDP will grow a little more quickly twenty years from now.

If it all sounds absurd, that’s because it is.

It appears that the economic argument isn't sitting well even among Sweden's parents. According to Christer Westerlund, chairperson of “The Child’s Right to their Parent’s Time,” because taxes needed to fund such programs are so high, “there is virtually no way a middle class family can have a parent caring for their own child without having them live below the poverty line.” Indeed, some Swedish economists now believe that, given the high rate of taxation, their economy would be better off without publicly funded universal daycare.

At the height of the Blitz, when Britain stood alone against fearful odds in its confrontation with Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt asking not for intervention, but rather that the United States “give us the tools and we will finish the job.”

When it comes to raising their children, Canadians are no different. They understand their responsibilities and simply want the government to give them the tools so that they can do their jobs. Those tools would be more of their own hard earned money in the form of lower taxes, and greater choice.

In other words, they want government to get off their backs and out of their pockets.

It would be a small price to pay for the benefit of all our children.