Earlier this year, Australian parents were horrified to learn that a 26-year-old male childcare worker in Victoria had been charged with more than 70 counts of sexual abuse. Authorities had to advise more than 2000 parents to have their infants tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
The state government commissioned a quick review of the state of childcare in Victoria and Premier Jacinta Allan promised an independent early childhood regulator with “real teeth” before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, on the national scene, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to spend $5 billion on a universal childcare system. This will include three days of subsidised childcare for most young families, building or expanding childcare centres, and wage rises for childcare workers.
The Catholic Weekly interviewed David Goodhart, a British journalist whose book The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality was published last year. He is deeply sceptical about the expansion of the care economy.
The Catholic Weekly: Are you surprised by this scandal in Victoria?
David Goodhart: I am surprised that the abuse continued for so long. That is clearly a major system failure. But when care of the very old or very young is carried out by strangers there is always a greater danger of abuse than when it is carried out by kin (though there can, of course, be abuse within families too).
The vast majority of carers are decent and conscientious. But to protect us from the few bad actors we need systems of regulation that strike the right balance between oversight and trust. Nobody wants to work in a nursery or an elder care home where their every move is monitored. On the other hand, the dependent young and old must be protected. CCTV is part of the answer.
For-profit providers operate around 75 percent of all childcare services in Australia. Would free, government-funded universal childcare solve the problem of abuse?
No, as people say, some degree of abuse is probably inevitable but with well-funded care systems – for the old and the young – and the right forms of oversight it can be kept to a minimum. Whether the homes or nurseries are run by private companies or the state makes no difference to the issue of abuse.
Is childcare really good for kids? You cite a chilling study of childcare in Quebec which suggested that children suffer from more anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression well into their teens.
This is a big and controversial question – and one that I devote quite a big section of my recent book The Care Dilemma to. As you note I cite the famous Quebec study based on comparing the outcomes for children in their system of highly subsidised childcare from the late 1990s, starting from as early as a few weeks, with children in other Canadian states where the formal childcare started much later. The results were not good for early institutional care.
I’ve read a lot of papers on this subject and I would say the consensus is far less favourable to early non-family care than is often assumed. There are many variables, above all the quality of the care in the nursery, the quality of the care they would be receiving at home, plus the age an infant starts and the number of hours it is exposed to formal care.
Of course, every child is different and many children seem to slot into external nursery care very happily – after maybe a few days of confusion – from just a few months of age. But from the evidence I have seen I would say that is not typical.
Indeed, most studies suggest that long exposure under the age of one is negative for both cognitive and socio-emotional development, between one and two there can be cognitive benefits, but it remains negative for emotional development. The experts disagree about the ideal age to start formal nursery, someone like Naomi Eisenstadt, one of the key figures behind the New Labour Sure Start scheme would say aged two is fine, more conservative figures like the American Erica Komisar would say aged three is the optimal starting point.
Before two, or three, care ideally remains primarily within the home from a primary carer, or a small group of primary carers including not just the mother but father, grandparents/friends maybe even a local child-minder for a few hours a week.
It seems that in both Britain and Australia, the government believes that going to an office or factory is empowering and personally satisfying for women while homemaking and child-rearing are not. Is this true?
It is one of the biggest divides between the political class and ordinary people in rich democracies. The successful, upper professional people who dominate public and business life tend to be very public realm orientated. Their identity comes in large part from their public achievements first in education and then in professional life. This has always been true of successful men and is now also true of many successful women too.
Catherine Hakim, the sociologist, a few years ago did a survey of adult British women and divided them three ways into the very career-orientated (20 per cent), the very family-orientated (20 per cent) and the adaptive (60 per cent), meaning women who wanted to combine both but when children are very small prefer to focus more on family.
The problem for our family policy is that it tends to be influenced by the 20 per cent of women who have risen to the top in business or politics but often don’t really speak for more family-focused women.
So in the UK, at least, our family policy is essentially nursery care, i.e. making it easier for both parents to spend less time in the family. We do, of course, have child benefit as well as maternity/paternity leave/pay but the latter are both miserly by international comparison. We don’t recognise the family in the tax system and we even have a two-child cap on welfare benefits.
Motherhood is not valued and we have evolved a kind of male default feminism. The Conservative Chancellor in 2023, Jeremy Hunt, actually said when announcing an increase in childcare subsidies that women should not waste their talents staying at home looking after their children.
As more women enter the workforce and as the population ages, we will need more carers. Will that be a problem? Where will they come from?
Very few people wish to return to the 1950s. In attitude surveys in the UK only about 7 per cent of people agree with the statement that “a man should go out to work and a woman should stay at home to look after the family”. But people do also value domesticity and only around 7 per cent of people agree that the best way to deal with the early years of parenthood is for both parents to work full-time – something that is actually the fate of around one third of young couples in my country.
So we do have plenty of carers – they are called mothers and fathers – and many more of them would like to stay at home and do some caring, especially when children are pre-school. Some of them would even like to be able to work part-time towards the end of their working lives so they could look after their elderly parents. Both of these things could potentially save the state billions.
For we are caught in a pincer. On the one hand we face sharply rising public spending from an ageing society and rising welfare/disability bills, while on the other hand 50 years of below replacement fertility mean smaller, weaker families passing care duties to the taxpayer and a shrinking tax-payer base to pay those bills without stepping onto a treadmill of ever rising immigration.
What do you think about the idea of giving a tax-free child voucher for use at a centre, or for a nanny at home, or to pocket while caring for their children, instead of government-subsidised childcare?
Many families will say, it’s all very well talking about encouraging domesticity and staying at home when children are young but we can’t afford to do it and still enjoy the lifestyle we want. But this is where the state could step in and provide the necessary support. I think the child voucher is a good idea. I have proposed something similar for the UK in my Care Dilemma book.
Currently in the UK we spend about £9bn a year offering 30 hours of free childcare a week to parents (delivered mainly by private sector nurseries), starting with infants as young as six months. If we paid that subsidy direct to parents, so they could decide whether to spend it on formal care or Granny or themselves, and front-ended child benefit (which lasts until a child is 16) paying maybe half in the demanding first three years of a child’s life, and recognised the family in the tax system, I calculate that you could generate a Home Care Allowance of around £10,000 a year per child.
That could make it possible for many more mothers or fathers to stay at home for the pre-school years without a crash in living standards.
Finland has such a system and it is very popular.
As more women enter the workforce and as the population ages, we will need more carers. Will that be a problem? Where will they come from?
We will need more carers. We need to value and pay care jobs more than we currently do. We need to attract more men into care, perhaps following the technology that can also help reduce the care burden. And some immigration too.
We should consider it an investment problem: how can we invest enough in the things we say we still want – having and caring for children, and decent care for the disabled and the growing army of the elderly – while honouring the newly-acquired freedoms and choices of recent decades, especially for women? This is why I called my book The Care Dilemma.
For the one-sided concentration on GDP growth in recent decades – including the movement of women from the home into part-time and then full-time work – has blinded us to the erosion of the taken-for-granted preconditions for growth found in the domestic realm, preconditions which within living memory enabled something close to replacement rate fertility and relatively stable family life.