When maternity leave morphed into parental leave it was, thankfully, just a matter of time before the childcare debate moved beyond gender. The focus is now moving away from ‘women’s choices’ to lost productivity in the workforce which is giving way to serious debate about the nation’s financial model for childcare.
The financial stress of a working life with children in 21st century Australia has rightfully become a community issue, not just one for parents. Measures to support working parents to date have been tokenistic. They have not kept pace with the unprecedented choices and expectations on parents. In particular, the choice to have children or not, when to have them, and the expectation of reaping the rewards of employment. Some couples delay the decision until it is too late. Others see jobs and babies as mutually exclusive, as childcare is simply unaffordable.
So, as a society, how do we propose to collectively care for our next generation? Grandmothers, aunts and uncles used to do it but rarely anymore. In many cases they are are still working themselves. The pace of social change has been rapid.
My childhood, a generation ago, was securely modest. My mother stayed home with me until I was five years old. By then my sister was 14 and my brother 11, and my mother hadn’t worked since the war. When I started school she worked – a little bit. As long as she could be finished by 2.30pm to pick me up and get dinner (main course and dessert) ready on the table for my father at 6.00pm.
My family’s aspirations were satisfied by a small home that was paid for, a week’s holiday in the nearby mountains or by the beach once a year, and a social life of slide evenings and community events. We went to the (free) local school.
It couldn’t have been further removed from my own parenting experience, not so much later, in the 1980s. Juggling two-parents full time working weeks to raise three children and pay their carers was torrid. 30 years on, the juggernaut has sped up again. 50 hour working weeks are not at all unusual for single or couple parents. Kids are picked up at the end of the working day from all over town. From day care, from crèche, from after school care. The cost is exhorbitant.
Parents love their children: it’s a life of pleasure and pain, oscillating from one to the other. Self-sacrifice is a given. Aspirations about buying a house, a start on renovations, a holiday, a meal out, or a new car, go quickly out the window to fund childcare and save for the children’s education.
Instead of crawling home to a quiet corner after a 12 hour day at work, parents walk into the other job where the babysitter or carer leaves – sibling dispute arbitrator, bath games coordinator, cook, dinner supervisor, bedtime storyteller. The routine is familiar to working parents all over the country. It’s a twelve year sentence of hard labour, per child. And that’s until they leave primary school.
The issues around work and parenting are momentous. There is currently no viable childcare strategy on the table. There needs to be a single, powerful agent of longer term change which recognises the central challenge of affordability. One of those options is fully tax deductible childcare.
We need to leave the fantasy of the 60s behind and recognise that life as we knew it, with Mum in the kitchen and Dad in the office, has gone forever for the majority of us. All power to the minority for whom that model still works. But for most we need a financially viable childcare system to care for children while parents work. Not working isn’t a luxury many parents can afford and why should it be when those parents can make a valuable contribution to the workforce?
Whether you see childcare as a powerful socialising tool and safety net for a society without extended families, or a second-rate option for children deprived of full time parenting, childcare is a reality. And the reality of childcare is that it is unaffordable for a vast number of families. The result of unaffordable childcare is children are not properly cared for, or parents are professionally diminished, or couples don’t have children. The repercussions of all of those compromise our community’s collective future.
If our children are neglected we sow the seeds of endemic future dysfunction. If parents don’t have the choice to work productively, we lose a large part of our society’s brainpower and educational investment. If women don’t have children, we’ll have to look somewhere else for a viable population.
If childcare is given its logical and rightful place in our taxation system, there should be no question that it is a necessary expense for parents in order to earn their income. Period. Can’t have the children cared for, can’t go to work, can’t contribute to the country’s productivity.
When the childcare industry is given the credibility it deserves, the overall quality of care will rise and career paths will be forged for more of the professionals within it. Not only will our future population have a better chance of being born, there will be a whole range of enrichment outcomes for children that are not consistently available from the current mix of good, bad and indifferent care options that families struggle to afford.
Investment in early childhood can only save the community dollars on the adolescent end and later. Who knows, it might even impact Australia’s current slide down the global educational ladder.
Why has childcare never been taken seriously on the taxation agenda? Is it for the same reasons that we undervalue nurses, teachers and parents who stay at home because we can’t quantify care and nurturing on a spreadsheet?
We don’t know what dollars to put against intangible human outcomes. We fail parents by refusing to address the realities of work-stressed families. For the sake of equity and sanity, and in the interest of the country’s economic performance, we need systemic solutions to the work and parenting dilemma. Fully tax deductible childcare could form part of the foundation, even if it’s only ideological. Accepting that the cost of childcare is an entirely legitimate expense incurred in the process of working is a vital attitudinal shift.