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CHILDREN RESCUED FROM CHILD CARE

Former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin made a number of foolish statements during his two years in office. However, perhaps one was more lacking in wisdom than others, in that during the 2004 federal election campaign, he stated that his party would hand over five billion dollars to the provinces to cover the cost of a national child care program. He then went on to say that he would use the Quebec government's "universal" $7 a day child care system as his model. Judging from recent information on the Quebec model of child care, Canadian children may have been rescued from disaster by the defeat of the Liberal government, which has terminated Mr. Martin's preferred national day care project.

Background to Quebec's Child Care System

The Quebec child care policy began in 1997, the centerpiece of which was the provision of child care spaces for all children aged 0-4 at a parental contribution of $5 per day. In 2004, the price was increased to $7 per day. Children were eligible, whether or not the parents were working. The cost of this program for the Quebec government was $1.56 billion annually, which, in 2004, represented 45% of all of Quebec's provincial budget for families. This new child care policy led to a very large increase in the use of government child care, and a sizeable increase in the labour force participation of married women. The rise in the government child care utilization reflected, however, according to analysis, a reduced use of informal child care arrangements which had been "crowded out" by this new subsidized child care. Partly because of this large "crowd out" of private care, the taxes generated by the new maternal labour supply fell far short of paying for the costs of the increased child care subsidies.

Studies Analyzing the Effects of Child Care Policy in Quebec

In July 2005, a study was released, carried out on behalf of the think tank C.D. Howe Institute by economic professor Michael Baker, from the University of Toronto and Professor Kevin Milligan, University of British Columbia and Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study was based on the National Longitudinal Survey of children and youth which follows the progress of a large, nationally representative sample of Canadian children. This study found "robust evidence" of marked negative effects on children placed in the Quebec child care facilities. These negative effects included hyperactivity, inattention, aggressiveness, motor/social skills, child health status and illness. Moreover, the analysis found that the child care program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health and lower quality parental relationships.

Almost all research on child care is subjective in nature. Ratings on the quality of child care centres, for instance, involve a researcher sitting in a daycare making judgments about the interactions of children and teachers. While these results are typically presented as objective facts, they are properly more to be considered opinions. However, in this case, the consistency of the results suggested to the authors the validity of their conclusion, namely that the more access to formal child care in Quebec, the more pronounced the negative impact on both children and their parents.

Why Quebec Child Care Is Detrimental to Children

The obvious question arising from the above study is why the impact of Quebec child care provisions is so detrimental to children.
The answer lies in another study carried out on 1500 day care settings in Quebec. The evaluation was conducted within the framework of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Benefits which annually surveys 2,223 children representative of children born in Quebec in 1997-98. The study was conducted in 2004 by Christa Japel, Professor of Education, University of Quebec in Montreal, Richard Tremblay, Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine and Psychology at the University of Montreal, and Sylvana Coté, Assistant Professor at the School of Psychoeducation at the University of Montreal. The results of their study included the following:

1. 61% of the Quebec day care centers met the criteria for minimal only quality in that although they ensured health and safety for children, their educational component was minimal.
   
2. 12% of the child care centers did not reach the minimal quality and were rated as inadequate.
   
3. Only one-quarter (27%) of the day care centers provided good quality child care that offered services appropriate to the children's development and to which constitute a stimulating environment.
   
4. In all types of day care settings, the quality of communication and interaction between staff and children was their greatest strength, but the quality of the educational and hygiene provisions were especially problematic.
   
5. Children who attended the government operated day care centres were generally from more privileged backgrounds than the children who did not. It found that families earning more than $60,000 comprised 60% of the children in the government's child care spaces, and that children from families earning incomes of less than $40,000 a year made up less than 20% of the total enrolments.
   
6. The overall quality of the day care attended by children from less privileged families was significantly lower than that of those attended by children from more privileged families. In this regard, in a previous study published two years ago in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Ms. Coté had found that children from troubled high risk families did benefit from "quality" daycare. However, such "quality" child care for these at-risk children was usually not available. That is, it appears that children from dysfunctional homes could benefit from high quality child care, which, unfortunately is often not available to them.

It is also alarming that the staff to child ratio in the Quebec day care system is extraordinarily high:

1 year old - one worker for five (5) children
3 year old - one worker for eight (8) children
5 year old - one worker for ten (10) children

Any mother who has cared for just one 1 year old child knows how trying and exhausting it can be - but five, one-year olds to care for at the same time, is an impossible task. Just to meet the children's physical needs would be difficult, let alone meeting the emotional and intellectual needs of these little ones.

Further, it is significant that the current Quebec guidelines require only 2.75 square metres of floor space per child, which includes toys, chairs and tables. This is less floor space than is allotted an ordinary work cubicle in a business operation. Children need space, time, love and devotion, not overcrowding with stressed care givers.

The description of child care as being the "warehousing" of children is tragically apt in regard to children in many Quebec child care centres. Because of the inadequacies of the Quebec system, the study recommended the following changes in the Quebec child care plan:

1. Re-examination of child: worker ratio and the minimum space required per child;
   
2. Expansion of centre based child care in low income neighbourhoods and for certain other targeted interventions because the present system has not only failed to reduce social-economic disparities but may instead have aggravated them.

Even though the Quebec government is spending $1.5 billion annually on child care, fully half of the children under four years of age have not yet been accommodated in the government regulated child care plan. Yet, perhaps these latter children are the lucky ones as revealed by the two recent studies.

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