Plea for Parental Choice in Child-care
by John Ballantyne, editor of Endeavour Forum newsletter
Canadian women's and children's rights activist Beverley Smith
has long campaigned for economic justice for families. She argues
that governments should value child-care and fund it equally, even
when it is mothers, fathers or grandparents who do it. She calls
upon governments to remove financial barriers that discourage
families from giving care at home. In 2003, she received a Queen's
Golden Jubilee award for her advocacy for unpaid labour.In Canada (as in Australia), a married couple with children, relying on one breadwinner's income, suffers heavy discrimination under the tax system and in regard to subsidies for child-care funding. By contrast, wealthier families with two full-time incomes enjoy two tax-free thresholds, not to mention generous government tax breaks and subsidies when they place their children in institutionalised child-care.
A family thus suffers multiple financial penalties whenever one of the parents leaves the paid workforce to raise children.
Beverley Smith says: "We have heard a lot of women express low self-esteem, saying 'I don't work' or 'I'm just a housewife'. Some women, told in the census, on the tax form and in any job applications that they do not work, sometimes have started to believe it. Challenge number one has been for us to remind women at home that they are actually doing vital work. They need the dignity of their own struggle."
"When women (or men) are now in the home, they are under huge pressure to not be there," she adds. A mother in the paid workforce who says she "has to" work, that she has no choice, "is admitting the financial pressure she interprets often correctly, from the state".
It is no coincidence, says Beverley Smith, that parents are so often faced with this financial dilemma. "It is an intended dilemma," she says. "The state wants people to have to go out to paid work. The agenda clearly is to create pressure that way, to create 'disincentives' to being a caregiver at home."
Valuing housework
Many governments, she says, fail to include unpaid housework
and care roles as part of the economy. To back her argument
Beverley Smith quotes economists who have acknowledged that
national accounts statistics provide an incomplete picture of a
nation's economic activity.
In 1978, the late Canadian-born U.S. economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in his popular book, Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics (1978), wrote, "Economists would get a very sudden increase in the GNP by discovering and including the unpaid labor of women." In 1994, Statistics Canada estimated that the value of household work could be one-third or more of the gross domestic product. In 1999, New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring declared in her study, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (1999), "Every time I see a mother with an infant, I know I am seeing a woman at work."
In October 2014, Canada's then Progressive Conservative government of Stephen Harper (prime minister from 2006 to 2015) belatedly introduced a multi-billion dollar package of tax breaks and increased child benefits for single-income two parent families with dependent children. In the following year, however, the Harper government was defeated in the general election. On coming to power, the new left-wing Liberal government of Justin Trudeau promptly repealed the Harper measures and resumed preferential funding for institutionalised childcare at the expense of home-based parental care.
Beverley Smith has called for "equal benefit under the law for each child, with no preferential funding given to receipted third party care", so that family-based care or at-home care receives equal funding. "I am in favour of universal funding for all children," she says. "I am in favour of choice, not just funding institutional child care but funding care of children wherever they are, even if at home or with a sitter or grandparent or nanny. Let freedom reign."
"Is it scandalous to suggest this?" she asks. "That is what makes it a revolution. No one is asking women to go back to the home; but the push for equal rights is to get governments to value the role at home, as one of the options. Any stereotype of a mother as a bedraggled woman not doing useful things, shows a bias against a role. Any pressure to make her leave her child shows a bias that favours the traditional male side of an economy and that is blind to the traditional female role. We are living in a tilted balance and that really does not give people choice."
She continues: "All children are of equal value. Raising children reduces one's ability to pay tax. Those raising children make a vital contribution to society and the state has a role to play in supporting and encouraging that role. Parents are the experts in matters concerning their own children and have a democratic right to choose the legal means of child-rearing best suited to their needs."
Confirming her view is a 2013 poll by Abingdon Research that found 76 per cent of those Canadians asked valued parental care above alternative methods of child-care. Their second preferred option was care by a relative; their third was third party day-care.
Beverley Smith says: "Having money 'flow with the child' is the most efficient way to enable parents to set up care situations that match their paid work, travel and family health needs.
"It also coincidentally would be a policy that has no gender bias. Women or men as caregivers would be recognised. Maternity benefits for those who give birth, would be accompanied by paternity benefits not based on paid work but on the existence of the child. Family care or 'leave' benefits would be gender neutral for times of crisis of illness or serious medical concerns. In this way we [would] return to citizens significant choices about how to live their lives, while valuing the family side of the career-family balance."
She lists the significant benefits that could be expected from
adopting such a policy: "an end of child poverty, fewer line-ups
for day-cares, a higher birth rate, more productivity, flexibility
and creativity at the paid job, less stress for parents and children,
a lower divorce rate, and lower costs for health care and criminal
justice". 