A conservative case for child care
Musing on this topic remains controversial to just about everyone
I wrote this piece for the Institute for Family Studies for several reasons. One is to speak as someone who calls herself conservative into the thorny child care debate specifically on the question of “who is best positioned to care for small children”? From my perch, the idea that conservatives universally believe moms must always stay home is a straw man. I don’t believe that, nor do I experience it in my largely conservative and churchy circles. (Please note I am not saying there aren’t those out there who speak judgmentally as conservatives to the detrimental nature of non-mom care. I personally know two academics who either left the study of child care, or the country he lived in, so as to avoid women angry about their child care research. Some were angry at the thought that daycare might have negative outcomes for kids. Others were certainly angry at the thought that anyone would claim moms aren’t best.)
All that to say I’m not naive about the debate surrounding these issues.
And at the same time, I don’t experience it or see it in real life.
I think the conservative case for child care does look different from a standard progressive viewpoint, and this is true even when considered not on the controversial social metrics of outcomes for kids, but based purely on financial reasons.
This is because no matter who pays for it (governments, or families) the economics of daycare in centres don’t work well. It is very difficult to make a financial case for daycare without either adding too many kids, or not paying staff well. Neither conditions are satisfactory for anyone who cares about people, small or big.
Then there’s the fact that vanishingly few people think the care of infants and babies ought to be done outside families. Keeping the care of really young kids inside the family and inside immediate community is a consensus point.
But then a conservative like myself might point out how a one-year-old is not exactly self sufficient. Is a two-year-old? Not quite. So what does “really young” mean? The answer is different things to different people.
At bottom, the realm of child care has to be a healthy ecosystem encompassing many forms of care.
Also at bottom, when the state gets involved in funding daycare, it moves us all toward the centre-based model not because it is best, but because it is easiest both to oversee and measure.
This is why the distinction between daycare (in centres) and child care (a big, broad ecosystem including family and centres among many other types of care) is not semantics.
What I’ve seen in public policy pushes us toward a mono-view of daycare as the best thing. All of the Canadian government’s rhetoric points this way and I’m not above calling that rhetoric propaganda, because it is so often-repeated, and loudly repeated, and also, not true.
If the topic of what a conservative case for child care but not daycare is interests you, click here to read more at the Institute for Family Studies.