David QuinnInflated claims about day care should be challenged, writes David Quinn
Decisions are being made that will affect your children and your grandchildren and how they are cared for, but with little real public debate.
As is usual in Ireland, what ‘debate’ there is, is taking place in such a way as to predetermine the outcome. The debate in this case involves day care. The predetermined outcome is that young Irish children must be placed in ‘high-quality’, State-subsidised day care centres because that will be of benefit to parents (especially women), of benefit to children and of benefit to the economy and society.
In order to arrive at this predetermined outcome, the ‘debate’ is taking place within extremely narrow parameters and for the most part only certain voices are heard, that is, pro-day care voices.
There is big demand for subsidised day care we are told from hard-pressed parents who often can’t afford the day care that is on offer.
High-quality day care, we are told, has lasting educational benefits for children.
Workplace
Subsidised, affordable day care will allow more women to enter the workplace. This is something they want and it is only the cost of day care that is preventing them from doing so.
Better educated children and more working women will benefit the economy and therefore society. It all sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?
But big, unchallenged assumptions are loaded into the debate. For example, is demand for subsidised day care as big as we think? Obviously if you ask parents an un-nuanced question such as whether they would like the State to pay for day care rather than themselves having to pay for it, they will say ‘Yes’, even if they don’t actually use day care.
However, present them with a set of alternatives and you will get a different answer. For example, an opinion poll conducted by Amarach Research in 2013 on behalf of The Iona Institute (which I head) presented a range of child-care options to respondents and found that just 17% of people see day care as the preferred option for young children under five years of age.
Half (49%) think the preferred option for children in this age group is to be looked after during the day by a parent at home and a quarter (27%) think the preferred option is to be looked after by another family member such as a grandparent. The rest had no opinion.
In addition, the poll found that 62% of people want State help to be provided to families in the form of a direct payment such as Child Benefit. Just 30% want extra money allocated to day care instead.
This puts a different complexion on things entirely.
In fact, a new study on child-care has just been published by the Economic and Social Research Institute. It draws on data from a huge, national study of children called ‘Growing Up in Ireland’. The new study is called ‘Non-Parental Childcare and Child Cognitive Outcomes at Age 5’.
It asks parents of the children being studied what type of childcare their children are receiving at nine months of age and three years of age.
At nine months, 60% of the children are being looked after at home by one of their parents. Only 10% are in day care centres. The rest are being looked after by a relative or by a childminder.
At age three, half are still being looked after at home by a parent. The number in day care has increased to 26% with the remainder again being looked after by a relative or childminder.
Day care advocates believe babies up to one year old should be looked after at home to build a secure attachment to their parents, but after that they basically believe a child’s place is in day care and a mother’s place is in paid employment, and they want us all to believe the same thing, hence all the pro-day care propaganda.
What about the claim that day care has big educational benefits for children? The aforementioned ERSI study looks at this and found “no difference overall in cognitive outcomes at age five between those cared for at home, and those cared for outside the home at age three (before participation in the Free Pre School Year).”
This is bad news for proponents of day care, but they have an escape clause because the study does not look in detail at the effects of ‘quality’ day care.
In addition, it cannot measure the effects of the Free Pre School Year on children’s educational standards (that is to say, “cognitive outcomes”) because almost every child is in pre-school and therefore there is no ‘control group’ of children at home full-time to compare them with.
However, the study does compare children in free pre-school who had a leader with a graduate degree and children whose leader did not have a graduate degree. It found only a very small difference in educational outcomes.
Argument
This seems to tell against the argument that ‘quality’ day care would make all the difference.
Quite an amount of research has been done in this area overseas. What it mainly seems to find is that quality day care, targeted at great expense at children from very disadvantaged backgrounds does seem to have lasting benefits.
This whole debate is actually hugely controversial. The vast majority of social scientists are on the left, they are pro-day care and are hugely resistant to any suggestions that day care isn’t all it’s made out to be.
Someone who discovered this to his cost is child-care expert, Professor Jay Belsky, a man of impeccable academic standing who produced a study back in the 1980s that tentatively suggested that day care might not be the goose that laid the golden egg after all, and was slaughtered by other social scientists because of it.
But Belsky’s conclusion to this day is that the research shows that the effects of day care, both good and bad, appear to be modest in either direction, although he advises us to proceed carefully before directing every child into day care.
What should be clear is that the huge claims day care proponents make in favour of day care need to be scaled back and the Government should be very slow to make huge spending commitments based on such inflated claims.
At the end of the day they need to go back to parents and find out objectively and scientifically, what kind of childcare they want for their small children; day care, parental care at home, care by a relative, a childminder, or a combination of all these things?
What is guaranteed is this; day care will not emerge as the preferred option of most parents, let alone the overwhelming majority. Of course, this may change if all the misleading pro-day care propaganda begins to work its effect on public opinion.