The revelations surrounding Joshua Dale Brown, the Melbourne childcare worker charged with more than 70 offences against infants, have shaken families across Australia. In response, the government has launched an urgent Rapid Review of Childcare and Early Education to examine safety, oversight and workforce culture within the sector.
As horrifying as these events are, they’ve also prompted a deeper reckoning. Parents are now asking not only “How could this happen?” but also “What are our alternatives?”
The truth is that we’ve built a care model that relies almost entirely on formal childcare while undervaluing the people already capable of providing it: fathers, non-birthing partners and grandparents. When that commercial system fails, families are left with nowhere to turn.
The childcare crisis has exposed a design flaw
Australia’s care system has been built on a narrow assumption: mothers are the natural carers, fathers are the financial providers, and institutions fill the rest.
We have professionalised care to the point that it has become something to purchase rather than something to share. Meanwhile, the natural caregivers within families are treated as optional extras. They’re helpful, but not essential.
This design only works when everything goes right. The moment it falters, mothers absorb the shock. When trust in childcare collapses, there is no fallback plan that doesn’t land on her shoulders. Too often, the solution is for her to cut back work, rearrange everything and carry the emotional load alone.
Fathers want to care, but we don’t let them
Many fathers and partners want to be active carers, but our social and workplace structures make that difficult. Flexibility is still treated as a perk rather than a right. Paid Parental Leave is improving, yet most men still take only a few weeks, fearing career penalties for doing otherwise.
Workplaces continue to reward constant availability. Government policy still assumes one “primary carer,” usually the mother. And most community programs — from playgroups to perinatal health services — don’t speak to dads at all.
The result is that fathers, partners and other caregivers are left standing at the edge of family life, willing but unsure how to step in. When crises like this occur, they too feel powerless.
Shared care isn’t just practical, it’s protective
When fathers, partners and grandparents are empowered to play an active role in daily caregiving, the benefits extend far beyond logistics. Shared care reduces isolation for mothers, strengthens family bonds and builds emotional safety nets that no formal system can replace.
Research consistently shows that maternal wellbeing improves when care is shared both emotionally and physically. It buffers against chronic stress, exhaustion and loneliness, the unrecognised epidemics of early parenthood.
Grandparents, meanwhile, remain the quiet backbone of Australian childcare, yet their contribution is rarely recognised. With rising living costs, longer working lives and no policies to support informal care, their help often comes at personal or financial cost.
We need to unlock these natural care networks, not as stopgaps, but as vital infrastructure for family life.
Rethinking the system through shared care
This crisis has given us an opportunity to pause and reflect on how we might do things differently. It’s a moment to ask what a care model could look like if it truly valued shared caregiving, not as an exception, but as the norm.
That means creating systems that make it easier for families to share the load from the very beginning:
- Embedding both parents as equal participants in perinatal and early-parenting programs.
- Making partner leave standard, stigma-free, and supported by meaningful incentives for uptake.
- Recognising the contribution of grandparents and extended family through thoughtful policy and tax reform.
- Redefining workplace flexibility so caring responsibilities by any parent or family member are respected, not penalised.
- Investing in community-based care networks that complement rather than replace formal childcare.
A moment for collective courage
The childcare revelations have shattered public confidence, but they’ve also exposed the narrowness of our vision for family life. We can’t keep patching a broken system and expecting it to hold.
Real reform means trusting the caregiving resources already within families and giving them the structural support they deserve. Fathers, partners and grandparents aren’t backup plans; they are the foundation of care itself.
We once said it takes a village to raise a child. But somewhere along the way, we built that village around mothers and left everyone else outside the gate. It’s time to rebuild it — not just safer, but stronger, broader and more human.