Best Mother’s Day gift is universal child care
Mothers, grandmothers and all who care about young children have child care on their minds this Mother’s Day. With a provincial election on June 7, there’s hope we are on the cusp of the transformative change advocates have been calling for since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women recommended a universal child care program in 1970.
We represent demographic bookends of child care advocacy: I, Laurel, am a grandmother of seven who worked most of my life, and I know how difficult it was to find child care in the early 1970s. Without the support of the trail-blazing child care centre at York University, I would not have been able to be in the paid labour force or community activism.
I, Lindsay, am a millennial leader. I mentor many early childhood educators (ECEs) across the province who love working with children yet need to have decent work and professional pay. My peers and I face a stark choice: either continue to work for low wages in a job they love, which provides considerable societal benefits, or put their lives on hold.
Many ECEs who hope to pursue this lifelong career cannot afford to start their own families.
And it is just not fair that educators who care for our children cannot afford to be mothers themselves.
Today, despite increasing involvement of fathers and second parents, in most families, child care remains primarily the purview of mothers. In addition to loving and caring for their children as all parents strive to do, mothers generally provide the bulk of unpaid child care at home. Sometimes mothers choose to be the full-time caregiver of their young children, but very often they have limited or no other options and may find themselves juggling part-time work with part-time unpaid caregiving.
The need for a system of high-quality child care is immediate and urgent. In the current patchwork of services, only 3-in-10 children younger than 5 have access to licensed child care, and that leaves out too many families. Seventy per cent of mothers with children under 3are in paid work, and many of them are stressed out because they just can’t find affordable, high-quality child care.
Ontario has the highest child care fees in Canada — and eight out of 10 families cannot afford licensed child care, according to economist Gordon Cleveland. So, many have to use less desirable alternatives. With two preschool children, the child care bill can be as high as $30,000, leaving close to nothing for food or transportation.
It does not have to be this way — Universal child care is possible. Many countries have shown that universal child care is beneficial to children and families while fuelling economic growth as it supports women to enter and remain in the labour force.
In Ontario, we have never been closer to an affordable system of publicly fund- ed child care. But to get there, we need to think big. These are our three big ideas for building a universal child care system that works for everyone:
First, make child care affordable for every family. Provide public funding to child care services the way we do for other services, such as libraries and recreation programs. Then set low fees or no fees so every family, regardless of location, age of children or income, can access child care.
Second, ensure that early childhood educators (ECEs) and staff, who are the key to high-quality programs for our children, have decent working conditions and professional pay. Recruiting and retaining qualified ECEs will require a provincially funded wage scale recognizing their level of education and years of experience, beginning at $25 per hour for registered early childhood educators.
Third, as additional services are created, ensure child care expansion is by public or not-for-profit programs that offer families high quality, trustworthy and stable child care. Every dollar of public funds must directly support our children.
Universal child care is possible. Ontario is ready for it. In fact, Ontario can’t work without it.
On this Mother’s Day, send the best gift to the one you love, ask your candidate to pledge to make universal child care a reality.