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Babies, Bureaucrats and Business: How women’s lives and babies’ wellbeing are being manipulated to serve economic and political interests |
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By Ann Manne
Do
our policy-makers know what is best for our families? Is their rhetoric
on providing a ‘head start in life’ with early daycare based on solid
research, or is it more about serving their political party’s
socio-economic agenda; that is, to bring more mothers back to the
workforce?
One of my children’s favourite fairy stories was
about a clever little shyster who wore a sign carrying the boast:
’Killed seven with one blow’. That boast was sufficient to bully
everyone into giving him anything he wanted. Only it was a clever
fraud. The ’seven‘ he ’killed in one blow‘ were actually flies.
According
to the childcare lobby, for every $1 invested in childcare $7 are saved
in the prevention of crime, delinquency and early school leaving
patterns. Like the clever trickster in the fairy story, the Australian
elite has swallowed this ’fact‘ hook, line and sinker. Parliament has
recently seen both major parties out-competing each other over who was
giving more money to childcare. For it is in such ’early learning’
programs, goes the chorus, that crucial ’brain development’ delivered
by those ‘experts’ — childcare workers — will give children a ‘head
start’ in life.
Labor’s Tanya Plibersek thinks the earlier the
better. The trajectory of her rhetoric means a Labor policy of
compulsory infant daycare from six weeks of age would surprise no one.
Liberal Jackie Kelly only wishes her party was as hard bitten by the
daycare bug, and wants the funding doubled.
One has to hand it
to the lobbyists. Put the kid into day care early, the longer hours
the better, and presto…those lil ‘ol brain synapses start snapping and
the kid goes to Harvard! It’s that simple! It’s as simple as saying ABC
… ABC Learning Centres, that is! Unhappily, it is a fairy story, too.
The illusion depends upon no one inquiring too deeply into the real
facts of the matter.
Why is it a hoax, and what are the real
facts about childcare? Let’s take that bogus, much quoted ‘for $1
invested $7 is returned’ figure. Where does it come from? It comes from
the Perry Preschool, which was a targeted, high-quality intervention
project offering 12 hours a week of care to impoverished, profoundly
disadvantaged African American children who were borderline
intellectually disabled, whose parents were either single mothers or
had unemployed fathers. It was a program not for infants, but for
three- and four-year-olds. It was not ordinary daycare, but was a
high-quality intervention program provided by genuine specialists and
had a home visiting program to improve seriously inadequate parenting
skills.
As the eminent child psychologist and researcher in
the prestigious NICHD (National Institute of Child Health and
Development [US]) study on early childcare, Jay Belsky, writes in a
recent article in The European Journal of Developmental Psychology, it
is completely misleading to extrapolate from the results of specialised
intervention projects where the study group has been especially
selected to be at high risk of conduct disorder.
continued below.
Sidebar
Progressive policy solutions for Australian Parents
Introduction of maternity and paternity leave with pay
Introduce European-style parental leave of two to three years, involving the right to return to previous job, as practised in France, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Britain has recently followed suit, introducing parental leave for two years. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission, following the ACTU test case, recommended an immediate extension of parental leave to two years and the right to part-time work. Offer parents a choice between home-care allowance or funds for a place in a high-quality childcare facility — as in Finland, Norway and France.
Encouragement and expansion of support for non-profit, community-based or co-operative childcare
Quality childcare is not compatible with profit-making for shareholders. Expand support for alternatives to corporate childcare, especially alternatives that also support working mothers — such as community childcare services, family daycare, parent co-ops. Provide generous allowances for grandparent carers.
Improvement of the quality of existing childcare
Present regulations in Australian childcare are inadequate in some areas. Increased funding should be explicitly targeted at improving the quality of existing care. Raise the ratios of caregivers to babies to 1:2, and improve ratios for toddlers. Keep overall size of centre and groups small. Introduce national standards to replace the present hodgepodge between states and the Federal Government. Better pay and training for all childcare workers.
Support for fathers’ involvement in children’s lives
No mother should be left isolated with the task of mothering, and no father should be expected to be disengaged from his children and family. Involved fathers help children flourish. The Parent and Child Support Centres should be father-friendly, i.e., have posters of fathers and children, not just mothers, and have information on fathering and fathers’ networks as a clear message that fathers are essential; that some fathers share the care or are primary caregivers, and are a part of the parenting community. Introduce paid paternity leave for up to four weeks at time of birth. Also, workplace agreements that accommodate fathers’ need to spend adequate time with their families, and fathers’ occasional need for carer’s leave.
Workplace reform: encouragement of mother/father-friendly workplaces
• Workplace-based childcare, with guaranteed breastfeeding breaks.
• Right to part-time work for primary caregiver with children under school age.
• Right to work a six-hour day (with reduced pay) until child is eight years (as in Sweden).
• Expand carer’s sick leave.
• Introduce the 35-hour week. Families need time all together.
• Gradual transition back to work after maternity or parental leave. The primary caregiver should not be given little choice but to return suddenly to a full working week, with babies in childcare for 10 hours a day: an extreme separation model.
Free re-training and remission of education expenses for all primary caregivers on re-entry to workplace.
The entire visible economy depends upon the invisible heart: unpaid caring work. All of society benefits from this vital work. Yet caregivers often suffer a life-long ‘care penalty’ for performing this task. In any just, fair and sustainable society it is wrong to take a ‘free ride’ on caring labour while giving little in return. Unpaid work should also be part of the census data.
Excerpted from the Manifesto for Children’s Wellbeing, A policy reform document created by Anne Manne, author of Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children; Robin Grille, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Kali Wendorf, editor of Kindred magazine. The document can be seen and endorsed here.
End sidebar
‘Given this unique population focus and mission, it should be more surprising than it often appears to be that early intervention and routine, community-based daycare, even so-called quality day care, are regarded — even in the scholarly literature — as more or less one and the same when it comes to discussing what we know about the effects of early experience on child development. What has been discovered when economically disadvantaged children are provided with very special experimental programs, often established for research purposes, is all-too-often presumed to occasion when far different populations of children are provided with community services that may be similar to experimental, centre-based, early interventions more in name (ie, “quality childcare”) than in actual practice.’
The usual ‘Show Projects’, cited again and again throughout the daycare advocates’ literature, are the Perry Preschool Project, the Abecedarian Project, and the Infant Health and Development Project. The misuse of this data by drawing conclusions from these rarefied circumstances is a common ploy by those who are engaged not in scientific debates about optimum child development, but in highly politicised campaigns on behalf of furthering a quite different aim — of increasing maternal employment.
As Belsky says, ’It is almost certainly a mistake to presume that what is discovered about the effects of centre-based ‘‘early intervention’’ programs targeted at indisputably at-risk populations of young children necessarily generalises beyond the (a) specific programs and (b) the specific populations studied. And it is this fundamental point that must be appreciated…’
In August 2006, an explosive new study from London University exposing the widespread misuse of a small number of studies on disadvantaged children to bolster the case for expanding ordinary daycare, gave Belsky’s position even greater punch. Noting that, ‘The cost-benefit figures of seven or eight dollars saved for every one dollar spent are widely cited in the academic and popular press in many countries, and have frequently been cited by senior politicians in the UK.’ In Australia, of course, that figure is routinely trotted out as if it is a ‘fact’ about the benefits of ordinary daycare. The London University study team explicitly set out to evaluate these claims. Emphasising that the ‘misapplication of findings from these three studies is likely to lead to a diminished, rather than enlarged, understanding’ the study team found “the widespread, international use of the most favourable headline findings, and in particular of the Perry High/Scope study, is unjustified. ... The targeting of low-income African-American children in ghettoised neighbourhoods, in a period of considerable racial tension, leads to considerable doubts about the generalisability of these interventions outside their original context.”
The researchers also found that these intervention programs ‘add little to understanding outside of a US context’. This is an important point, since the most generous headline figures from these three studies are so widely cited.
As British writer on work and family issues, Jayne Buxton says, using ‘showcase studies involving underprivileged children to hoodwink the general public about the benefits of full time daycare for all children is irresponsible’.
Those specialised programs are a long way from the have-it-all generation of affluent parents putting a six-week-old baby in ordinary Australian childcare, where the ratios are one caregiver to five infants, for up to 50 hours a week. With 10 babies to a room, when one caregiver feeds a baby, the other child carer has nine babies to care for. If a mother had quintuplets we would regard it as a parenting emergency — and help would be called for. One visiting overseas developmentalist rightly described such care as a ‘licence for neglect’. The Perry Preschool it ain’t.
In a plethora of recent media stories, a widespread crisis in the quality of Australian childcare has been exposed. Some involve cases of gross neglect where children are left screaming with broken arms or escape, unnoticed, from centres into busy streets. Other evidence concerns more subtle aspects of care which enhance or harm a baby’s brain development. Take, for example, crucial interactions called ‘joint attention sequences’ between caregiver and baby, which build secure attachments, language and cognitive development. Three separate investigations looking for these in childcare in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, found almost none! The casual assumption that early childcare equals optimum development would be hilarious if it were not so tragic.
It gets worse. Another ploy is to use evidence which shows benefits of quality preschool programs for the over-threes, as if it equally applies to the under-threes. This brings us to the second fundamental distinction — the age of the child affects the outcome. The younger the child, the higher the risk; what the international scholarly literature shows on this question, is that far from an inevitable benefit, early and extensive childcare for the youngest age groups carries very real risks.
The most sophisticated study as yet carried out by the US National Child Health and Development (NICHD) involving more than 1,000 children, revealed that by kindergarten age, three times as many (17 percent) children who had experienced more than 30 hours of childcare a week from infancy had emotional and behavioural problems — as those who experienced less than 10 hours a week. The more childcare, the more problems in a dose for dose response; aggression such as ‘getting into many fights, showing cruelty, bullying or meanness to others, physically attacking other people, and being explosive, showing unpredictable behaviour’.
Most importantly, the quality of childcare did not remove the risk. It was the age of child and the quantity of care -— longer hours — which was the problem. That study is not alone. Over the last few years, several other large-scale studies have also found the link between early and extensive hours and the higher risk of aggression and anxious behaviour. Four more large-scale studies in Britain, from London and Oxford Universities, in Ireland and from California also produced similar results, even for children of the most advantaged, affluent, and well educated parents.
A recent (2005) Canadian study by Michael Baker from the University of Toronto and Jonathan Gruber, from MIT and Kevin Milligan from the University of British Columbia, for the US based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showed the sheer folly of extrapolating from studies of disadvantaged children, to the wonders meant to flow from making childcare a universal program. Examining the province of Quebec, after a universal childcare program was introduced, they found that child and maternal wellbeing actually deteriorated!
'We carefully analyse the impacts of Quebec’s “$5 per day childcare” program on childcare utilisation, labour supply, and child (and parent) outcomes in two parent families. …we uncover striking evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioural and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.’
Despite being lambasted as ‘zombies’ and guilty of ‘statistical malpractice’ by a furious daycare lobby, the Canadian researchers’ conclusion is not an isolated one. When Professor Ted Melhuish, an internationally respected childcare scholar, reviewed all the international childcare research for the British National Audit Office, he found many other studies, even in Scandinavia, confirming the Anglo-North American research.
The research showing risks does not stop with the findings on the raised aggression and behavioural problems found in children with early and extensive childcare experience. The potent stress hormone, cortisol, has also been found in the saliva of children especially in centre-based daycare. One recent British study found 90 percent of babies experienced a jump in cortisol levels when placed in even high-quality daycare. Separated babies had cortisol levels between 75 to 100 percent higher than those measured at home. Even after months of adaptation, cortisol levels declined slightly, but remained higher in the childcare setting than at home. This reveals a childcare experience — from the baby’s point of view — very different from the ‘happy talk’ of the adults promoting it.
Very young children find it stressful and anxiety provoking to be away from their parents. The longer term implications are worrying — chronically higher levels of cortisol may have an impact on the child’s future capacity to cope with stress. It is also a hormone associated with depression. Higher cortisol, it has been suggested by Australian researchers Margaret Sims and Trevor Parry, may ‘have contributed to the negative outcomes associated with childcare attendance demonstrated in much of the literature’. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest we would be ill advised to ignore the potential long-term implications of chronically higher cortisol. As one article in the prestigious Child Development journal concluded:
‘…there are reasons to be attentive to the child care cortisol findings described below. In research on animals there is strong evidence that early experiences shape the reactivity and regulation of neurobiological systems underlying fear, anxiety, and stress reactivity. The neurobiological changes associated with early experience manipulations are believed to model the neural substrate of vulnerability to anxiety and depressive disorders. Animals who as infants have been exposed to conditions that activate the hypothalamic level of the HPA axis (ie increase corticotrophin releasing hormone activity) as adults exhibit heightened fearfulness and greater vulnerability to stressors… In addition, elevated cortisol levels impair immune functioning, thus increasing susceptibility to infectious disease…’
Such new research has seen the parenting guru Steve Biddulph, read by over four million parents worldwide, change his mind on daycare safety for the under-threes. It is not only individual parenting experts who are doing an about face. It’s whole nations.
The Scandinavian systems rely not on early infant day care but paid parental leave for the youngest children. As Ed Melhuish says, ‘for the first 18 months to two years of life, the cost of good-quality care is potentially very high, and is comparable in cost to paid parental leave for two years…’ Moreover, if parents are given a real choice: ’The Swedish case is very revealing…when parental leave was increased ….now there is remarkably little use of childcare under 18 months. Parents voted with their feet.’
Recently Britain, in a welcome move, responded to the new evidence of risk by providing up to two years of parental leave, funding a considerable portion of the first year, and giving parents of young children the right to part-time work. For a government which seemed hell bent on pushing women to return to work within a few months of childbirth, that is a complete about face. Patricia Hewitt, British Trade and Industry Secretary, even apologised for giving ’the impression that we think all mothers should be out to work, preferably full time as soon as their children are a few months old‘ and called for the recognition and re-valuing of ’the unpaid work that people do within their families’. Tanya Plibersek, please note!
At present in Australia, most parents regularly express the desire in opinion polls to raise their own children. Recent Australian opinion data collected for the International Social Survey Program, a sophisticated survey where questions are designed and tested, and with many questions approaching the issues from different angles, by Mariah Evans and Jonathan Kelly of Melbourne University, showed ’a widespread preference for staying home’. Seventy-one percent thought women should stay home, 27 percent thought they should work part time, and only 2 percent believed women with children under six should work full-time. When asked to rate their personal preferences on working or staying home with young children (a different approach to the question above which uses the normative word, ‘should’) over 81 percent gave strong and warm responses to staying home, only 9 percent gave warm responses to the idea of full-time work.
Those ideals are reflected in actual behaviour. Most parents don’t use childcare for the under-threes! Rather, their behaviour follows what the scientific research shows is the pathway of least risk — very little childcare for the under-threes, a little more when they are older. Part-time care is preferred and utilised rather than 50 hours a week. In 2005, for example, after decades of propaganda and distortion on behalf of the wonders of daycare, the use of formal care for infants under one year of age was a mere 7 percent. Around 31 percent used it at age one, around 50 percent at age three — and much of that is for preschool type activities. Only 38 percent of four-yearolds went to formal childcare, as many went instead to preschool. Of those children who used formal care, almost 50 percent used it for less than 10 hours per week. Only 7 percent used it for more than 35 hours a week.
There is at the moment an almost complete disconnect between the science, parental preferences and behaviour, and what politicians are saying and advocating! We should not be expanding childcare for babies and toddlers. We should be providing sensible, viable alternatives like extending parental leave. For it is supple, sensible policy, not fairy stories, that Australian parents need most.
Anne Manne is a Melbourne writer. Her book, Motherhood; How should we care for our children? was published by Allen & Unwin in 2005. (See our Editor's Choice book section) Her essay ‘What About Me? The New Narcissism’ appeared in the June edition of The Monthly.
Published in byronchild/Kindred, issue 19, September 06
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