Thousands of Australian children screamed for their loving and able parents at daycare drop-off this week. Those who tired of screaming outwardly would have entered the latter stages of separation anxiety, despair and detachment.
Parents think a toddler has settled in at daycare when really the child has learned that crying for help is no use. The interactions children have with an educator charged with the care of at least three other children will likely be less sequential and responsive than in a home environment. The infections they contract at daycare no doubt will reduce their quality of life even at home. This can hardly be a practice where the rights or views of the child are considered.
In a daycare environment, the brain of an infant is searching constantly for the faces of their primary caregivers. They will try to make sense of their world through their interactions with the strangers assigned to care for them, but part of their brain will be preoccupied by the search for safety or comfort.
This searching occurs at the expense of the development of other foundational brain functions that occur optimally in a relaxed state.
Babies entering daycare at six months old will grieve the absence of their primary caregiver before entering survival mode and attaching to the caregiver available to them. The quality of interactions they have with those who care for them and disruptions to the identity of this caregiver will determine their brain architecture for life. The sense of safety, or lack thereof, we learn in our earliest months stays with us and shapes our emotional reactivity or resilience.
Harvard University’s Centre on the Developing Child released a detailed working paper almost a decade ago that outlined how excessive stress disrupts the developing brain. The centre called for urgent reconsideration of support for families that focused entirely on pushing mothers of young children into the workforce.
“It is difficult to justify the extent to which public discussion about support for low-income parents focuses primarily on maternal employment and other adult behaviours, while the specific needs of the young children in these families are afforded relatively little attention,” the working paper reads.
“Our knowledge of the importance of supportive relationships as buffers against the adverse effects of stress on the architecture of the developing brain indicates the need for serious reconsideration of mandated employment for mothers of very young children, particularly when access to high-quality childcare is not assured.”
The Parenthood chief executive Jessica Rudd told the National Press Club on Wednesday that childcare could solve our problems with lagging education standards and economic productivity, despite the fact childcare has been used by hundreds of thousands of Australian families for decades with only evidence of continuous decline in these areas. Astonishingly, she described mothers in caregiving roles in the home as “atrophying” and begged them to return to paid work: “We need you back.”
It’s difficult to understand how an organisation that so badly degrades care work in the home can claim to represent families. How can one harbour such contempt for the care of children or “wiping bums and cutting up fruit”, as Rudd called it, when it’s done by a family member but glorify that work when performed in a childcare centre?
Childcare advocates also repeatedly fail to address the problem of delivering high-quality universal childcare in a country where the sector is overwhelmingly privatised and operated for a profit. Universal childcare is affordable in socialist countries that have built primarily publicly provided and not-for-profit childcare sectors from the outset. However, in Australia, where universal childcare means subsidising private companies, it becomes difficult to ensure public funds are used for their intended purpose of assisting families rather than bolstering profits. This is why a Medicare card won’t get you far in a private hospital.
The lobbying for the delivery of Medicare-style universal childcare in Australia is being peddled by people who don’t appear to grasp the extent or implications of for-profit dominance in our childcare sector and the incompatibility of such a scheme with the delivery of childcare.
Countries that offer universal childcare also rarely deal with babies under one year old, who require more intensive staffing and for whom the benefits of centre-based care are unable to be established. Instead these nations enjoy lengthy paid parental leave, often followed by parenting payments in lieu of using a publicly funded childcare position. The long-term benefit of universal childcare in sectors dominated by public and not-for-profit providers, where the quality is high and where children start later, is plausible. Whether there is a long-term benefit for children attending lower-quality, for-profit centres from birth remains highly questionable.
The latest campaign from childcare advocacy quarters is to have a child’s access to daycare enshrined in law.
Thrive By Five recently launched its Make It Law campaign pushing for the government to be legally bound to provide the cheapest possible daycare to every Australian child who is not yet at school. Campaigners are calling it the Canadian model of delivering $10 a day childcare from birth, but this model originated specifically in the province of Quebec where the notorious universal childcare scheme resulted in a generation of children hampered by socioemotional deficits. The bad press from Quebec’s childcare policies implemented more than two decades ago still lingers in research literature and the media, so it’s easy to understand the reason behind the crafty Canadian rebrand.
The Make It Law campaign coincides with the Productivity Commission’s recommendation that Australian children from birth to age five be entitled to a minimum of three days of free childcare. While the authors concede there is “much that is not known” in the research literature and that predictions on children’s outcomes are “highly uncertain”, they otherwise maintain a concerted effort to avoid any consideration of the potential adverse effects of childcare on children under three years old.
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the US is credited with the largest randomised control study of its kind measuring the impacts of childcare from birth to 4½ years old.
In 2002, it released findings that showed children who spent more time in centre care experienced increased behavioural problems. A follow-up study found children exposed to more hours in centre care also had poorer work habits and poorer social skills in primary school.
On the home front, in 2006 an Australian meta-analysis of studies testing the cortisol levels in kids’ saliva found that children in daycare experience increased levels of the stress hormone than those cared for by parents.
If the research in this area is lacking, by the authors’ own admission, how did the Productivity Commission manage to land on a 30-hour a week entitlement for newborns and five-year-olds alike? It’s twice the current preschool entitlement in most states, with research literature struggling to establish benefits of preschool beyond 15 hours a week. “Advocacy,” came the short answer from associate commissioner Deborah Brennan at the handing down of the draft report. “We had strong representation from the community.”
It seems childcare advocacy groups, rather than the research base, are guiding policy development.
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