The childcare factory

Does this benefit children who are exposed to reality from an earlier age and are quickly aware of the sacrifices required to achieve the lifestyle their parents are able to offer. Are they better able to adapt to a communication-based society? Or does it actually result in a homogenous breed of child that, from an early age, follows a predictable routine which fails to diverge from the thousands who attend childcare across the country.

ABC Learning promises to help children learn, nurture their development and protect them in a safe place. They also promise to, “… continue to focus our efforts maintaining growth for shareholders”. Does this safe environment, run to a balance sheet, truly challenge children to grow as individuals? Surely they deserve at least a few years stumbling upon their own answers to life rather than accepting the consensus promoted in an environment that encourages convergence of behaviour and attitudes.

Childcare centres provide a necessary service and expose children to “reality” several years earlier than used to be the case when school was the first shy foray into the world. How this arrangement serves children remains to be seen. Will this new norm speed up the development of their people skills, arguably our true value to the world? Or will it lead to a generation who are alike in all too many ways because of an innate desire of all humans, especially children, to assimilate - speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes, following the same trends and seeing the world through the same-coloured glasses.

Deciding how to care for our children in their formative years is crucial and the cultural, financial and personal pressures that cloud this decision need to be recognised and accounted for. Perhaps a drastic shift in policy is in order.

In Sweden, children are the number one priority from the outset and parents are granted 390 days leave on 80 per cent of their salary and many countries throughout Europe and Asia offer parents maternity leave, paid at over half of their current earnings. While Australia’s tax base could not sustain such policies, especially given the recent tightening of economic conditions, there is scope to provide parents with more generous leave entitlements.

I propose funding maternity leave in an arrangement similar to the loans students accrue during their years of studying. Parents would be offered a certain number of paid childcare days each year, calculated at a set percentage of earnings. This loan would then be repaid as earnings tipped over a threshold, and would be indexed to inflation. Such a policy would encourage lasting care for children and would replace the questionable one-off baby bonus payment of $5,000. While the baby bonus has achieved the baby bounce, evidenced in the higher fertility rate, desperately sought by the previous Treasurer, it has done little to address the lack of support parents receive post-birth.

When Peter Costello pleaded with couples around Australia to procreate with abandon, he selfishly sought to secure the country’s future tax base without acknowledging the pressures that prevent parents from freely choosing how to care for their children without paying a price at work, at the bank and more broadly in society. Reproducing may secure the economic future of the nation but creating a diverse society where ideas thrive requires the creativity of individual parents, not a business where the bottom line rules.

Production lines belong in factories; children belong in the care of their unqualified, untrained but somehow most suitable creators.