ListenCANADA
Daycare must develop our children
For many parents, finding adequate – or any – daycare services is a huge problem.
In my limited experience, the mothers or fathers either stay at home at great financial expense – living on one income is difficult these days – or go back to work and try to find a daycare that is accepting children. This too, I am told, can be a challenge.
Some parents try to rely on friends and relatives to save money, because daycare isn’t cheap even if you find something that lines up with your work hours.
As one of my relatives found out, being a single father working in the construction industry in the Lower Mainland narrows your options drastically.
Most operators don’t want to start work at 6 a.m. and cater to workdays beginning at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. or 5 p.m.
He couldn’t find anything for his daughter at first – a friend agreed to open her business early so he could get to work on time.
But what if there was some form of publicly-funded child-care system that all parents could access, where children would receive the same quality of care, no matter how much money their parents made?
Research compiled by the Human Early Learning Partnership, a project co-ordinated at the University of B.C. and funded by the province, shows 34 per cent of Nanaimo children enter kindergarten vulnerable on at least one scale of development – a little higher than the provincial average of 30.9 per cent.
That’s no surprise with the number of low-income families in Nanaimo – watching soap operas with grandma all day is not going to prepare a child to hold a pencil, communicate with others, recognize numbers or concentrate on what the teacher is saying.
Kindergarten teachers monitor children on five different measures of development: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication skills.
Research indicates how well a brain forms by age six determines not only a child’s performance in school, but also subsequent health and behaviour later in life – these children are more likely to cost the system huge dollars in medical bills, emergency services or jail time as they grow up.
A public child-care system could pay for itself in the long run – trained educators would work with children, ensuring they spend their time in care doing developmentally stimulating activities.
The province sees value in this, as the Education Ministry has talked about opening preschools for three- and four-year-olds and has made kindergarten into an all-day, instead of a half-day, program.
In many households, both parents must work to make ends meet and don’t have as much time to spend with their children as parents did 30 or 40 years ago. Other parents are, for various socio-economic or other reasons, unable to give their children adequate support.
With universal access to quality daycare, at least someone is spending time helping a child prepare to learn.
Paul Kershaw, with the Human Early Learning Partnership, estimates that reducing the number of kindergarten kids who are vulnerable upon entering the system would save the province billions of dollars in crime costs alone.
In The New Deal for Families, he states that access to childcare services with fees of no more than $10 a day would remedy “today’s epidemic of unregulated, unaffordable child care and early learning services”.
This service would give parents enough employment time to manage the rising cost of housing and stalled household incomes, he says.
Investing in the future generation is important – we need intelligent youths who are going on to university, training to take on the high-level jobs that we will be leaving when we retire.
Youth who will be paying taxes into the system that we will rely on to support us in our old age.
Jenn McGarrigle
23 January 2012
