National daycare no good for women
Ishould like the idea of universal daycare. The powers-thatbe tell me that as a young woman, working, and married — I’m the very demographic for whom low-cost tax-payer funded daycare would supposedly help the most.
Yet, I despise the very concept. The Swedes can keep it.
On Monday Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced a $10 a day national child-care plan modelled after the Quebec program that’s set to cost $30 billion to introduce and $8.3 billion annually to maintain. The provinces, if they agree, are on the hook for 50/50, so the cost could be double.
The budget declares the benefits of universal daycare like universal truths: economic growth, early learning development and mothers with children aged one to four years old get to participate in the labour force to the same extent as fathers do. Plus — feminism, just because.
Oh the hubris!
Not, to be clear, that I’m against outsourcing child care in itself. Parents who wish to send their children to private daycare are free to make that choice — and pay for that choice themselves. Actually, they likely don’t even have to pay for it all themselves because low-tomedium income families already get help from the government, sometimes in three different ways: through cash from the Canada Child Benefit (CCB), through provincial daycare subsidies and through deducting up to $8,000 of child-care expenses at tax-time.
So before Canada dishes out tens of billions to implement a nationwide creche, perhaps redundantly, should we not first stop for a moment and examine the budget’s claims more critically?
For, as it turns out, universal daycare is good for no one — not our economy, not our children and certainly not our women.
Advocates argue that universal daycare is ultimately good for the economy because the government can collect taxes from the now-working woman, plus the taxes of the daycare worker. But when economists Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber and Kevin Milligan examined the Quebec program in the Journal of Political Economy in 2008 they concluded that the increased tax revenue only offset the cost of the $2.6 billion program by 40 per cent.
A 2015 study in the journal Labour Economics on Quebec’s program by Catherine Haeck, Pierre Lefebvre and Philip Merrigan states that “even in the best case scenario, the costs were larger than the benefits”.
Only one study, by Pierre Fortin, Luc Godbout and Suzie Stcerny claims the program “pays for itself” and they engage in a labyrinth of assumptions to arrive at their conclusions. It is likely from this study that the budget gets the statistic that the program raised Quebec’s GDP by 1.7 per cent. The authors reach that conclusion because daycare supposedly raised maternal participation in the workforce 3.8 per cent. But we shouldn’t be so quick to assume that it was daycare alone that was responsible — both older women and male participation in the workforce increased in the same time frame, and this effect is not replicated in any European country with universal daycare. Any economic claims are suspect, at best.
Nor is there much evidence that universal daycare is good for children. Despite the budget lavishing praise on the Quebec system, two long-term studies on its childcare system, also by Baker, Gruber and Milligan, tell a dark tale. These scholars talk of consistent and robust evidence for negative effects on child outcomes, especially for boys. Think more hyperactivity, inattention, aggressiveness, issues with motor and social skills plus a reduction of the child-parent relationship. “Most strikingly,” they report, “We find a sharp and contemporaneous increase in criminal behaviour among the cohorts exposed to the Quebec program, relative to their peers in other provinces.”
OK, then.
But surely, if it’s not in the best interest of our children, it must at least be good for their mothers?
Except, when we actually bother asking mothers what they want instead of regurgitating the handbook of The Feminist Cause, we find that what they really want, the world over, is to work parttime. Astonishingly, mothers with young children don’t want to put work at the centre of their lives.
In only 25 per cent of Canadian couples with a child under six were both parents working fulltime, according to Statistics Canada. In a recent Angus Reid poll 84 per cent of Canadian parents said they wished to stay home fulltime until their children were in grade school. Almost 60 per cent of mothers with minor children say working part-time is ideal, according to a PEW Research Center survey conducted in America in 2007. Even advocacy group, the Working Mother Institute, found in a 2015 survey of employed mothers that 70 per cent of respondents would choose to work part-time if they could still have a meaningful and productive career.
And if low-cost daycare was the only barrier preventing mothers from working full-time then we would expect to see closer to equal labour participation rates between the sexes in countries which have implemented it. But we don’t. Not even close.
In Sweden, 32 per cent of women with one child work parttime. In Denmark 22 per cent. In England, 45 per cent. In Iceland, 38 per cent and in Norway, 37 per cent. And the more children women have, the more they rely on part-time work — a full 30 per cent of Danish mothers, 40 per cent of Swedish mothers and 60 per cent of British mothers with three or more children work parttime.
Offspring, it appears, makes no difference to men’s work priorities, except to make them work harder and longer — the male employment rate in Europe is 73 per cent, which increases to 85 per cent with one child and increases yet again to 89 per cent with two children — almost entirely fulltime.
So if we’re going to spend billions of dollars in public money to purportedly support women’s preferences should we not let her decide those preferences for herself ?
We could, for example, send mothers a bigger CCB cheque so that the ones who want, or need, to work full-time can further offset the cost of private daycare, and others who want to use it to replace a lost wage or pay for inhouse help can have more financial support to do so. We can also experiment with ways to reduce the high cost of private daycare, such as reducing red tape and regulations to increase supply.
But certainly the last thing we should do is impose a top-down, inefficient program driven by an ideology without hard evidence of the advantages.
EVIDENCE FOR NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON CHILD OUTCOMES.