We Are the State

We Are the State
by Sandra Griffin

I recently participated in a talk show hosted by Dr. Mark Genuis, who is known for his right-wing views on the role of child care in the lives of children and families. Dr. Genuis would like us to believe that every time a parent uses child care services instead of staying home, that parent is abandoning the child to “state care”—that the child will be badly served, and will not grow up to be all he or she can be because of being in child care. Dr. Genuis would like us to believe that if only families had a few more tax breaks and didn’t need to “waste” money on child care, the world would be right—and then, of course, he would be right.

Unfortunately Dr. Genuis is wrong—both about child care in general as well as in the very premises on which he fear-mongers: the concept of evil/bad embodied in state care; the call to get the state out of the lives of families; the idea that parents should not trust the state with their children; the notion that the state is lurking around the corner, waiting to sneak away with Canadian children and deliberately ruin them. But wait! In a free and democratic society, we are the state! It is our responsibility to ensure that as the state, we build the infrastructure that best meets the needs of our populace.

These are our realities. Seven out of 10 mothers with children under age six are in the labour force and almost nine out of 10 working women return to work within a year after giving birth. For the over
3-million children with mothers in the labour force, there are just over 500,000 regulated child care spaces. No tax cut is going to replace a second income in a family. Good child care, by parents and, when the parent can’t be there, by caregivers in high quality child care services, is good for children. And each year in poor quality care is a long time to carve out of the life of a developing child. Dr. Genuis’ attacks on investing in child care services actually contributes to the carving out of many years from many children’s lives.

I want to remind Dr. Genuis that each of us contributes to the state—that people working within services and programs that happen to be funded through tax dollars are human beings—and that a great many of them care about their work, just like other Canadians in other sectors. With the recent release of the You Bet I Care study, we know that the majority of early childhood educators and child care practitioners in regulated centre-based and family-based child care services do not have the resources they need to provide the highest quality services—services that our children and their parents deserve, as citizens of the state we call Canada.

The majority of children in child care settings are in safe and nurturing environments, with a dedicated workforce doing the best it can in an underfunded system. That is good news and the least we can expect for our children. However, if we, as the collective state, increased wages to the sector, expanded opportunities for increasing education levels and provided resources for the acquisition of the necessary materials and resources to provide stimulating programs, we would be truly working toward the shared vision embodied in the National Children’s Agenda:

• supporting parents and strengthening families
• enhancing early childhood development
• improving economic security for families
• providing early and continuous learning experiences.

Two other panellists on the show tossed out figures about tax cuts to enable parents to stay at home. They seemed incredulous that $2.2-billion could be designated out of tax dollars to pay for the recently signed First Ministers’ Agreement on early childhood development, correctly referring to tax dollars as “our dollars.” Where they went wrong was in assuming that spending “our dollars” on services for children and families was at odds with putting more money in the pockets of parents.

Their proposition is to give the money to parents, who then choose what they want to do with it and that it will somehow all work out in the end. I’m not quite sure how; if we divided this money amongst the parents of children under the age of six, it would work out to considerably less than $200 per child per year. How many times would we have to multiply that $2.2 billion to replace all those second incomes for two-income families and sole incomes in single parent families through the tax system? How about the loss in taxes those incomes represent to provincial/territorial and federal coffers? And, while they tout choice, what they have not thought through is that parents can’t choose something that doesn’t exist—many parents don’t have access to high quality child care services. Period.

What is wrong with spending our money to make income security for families and positive stimulating early learning and care for children a reality? Research supports the positive effects of high quality child care services, so who is actually being reckless with our dollars in this debate? I’m incredulous that we have to debate the point. Children are, and will always be, Canada’s real bottom line. It is time we all, Dr. Genuis and friends included, woke up to that fact and invested accordingly—it is the best investment we, the state, can make in our collective futures.

Sandra Griffin is the executive director of the CCCF.

Interaction, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 2001, p. 4.