State-Funded Child Care

The Liberals and the NDP decry the Conservatives for not having launched a universal day-care plan, which both the Liberals and the NDP have mused about for a decade. Something that might be modelled after the Quebec day-care option, with $7-a-day, government sponsored and defrayed day care. Which the Conservatives years ago turned around and opted instead for a far less costly and less-intrusive yearly child-care support to parents to decide for themselves how the funding should be spent.

It's a nominal sum, serving as a recognition that some parents prefer to raise their children with one parent at home, rather than farm their children out to day-care providers. It is a tip of the hat to standard, old-fashioned parenting, in fact. And an admission that the Conservatives see it as impractical in the sense of becoming too great a financial burden for the taxpayer to support the concept of affordable, regulated, universal day-care. The public education system exists as a needful model of state-subsidized education.

As for the supposed effectiveness of state-subsidized day-care for the country's children, leaving parents not only free to get out into the workforce, but seeming to insist that they do so, since they have been freed by the state to do just that; parents feel the obligation they are under to leave the raising of their children to others. The end result of which can be far different than what those who encourage and demand it might anticipate, given the experience of a country which devoted itself to that very concept.

Sweden, with its long history of admired and often-emulated social welfare, had its universal, state-subsidized child-care system evaluated and the resulting study published in 2006 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Sweden at the top and Canada at the bottom in child care provision. The comprehensive, affordable day care available in Sweden, and its history of gender equality has resulted in a very high percentage of women joining the paid workforce. After all, the demanding occupation of child care has been removed.

Because of a policy of generous parental leave of sixteen months after birth, mothers look after their babies for the first year-and-a-half. After that fully 92% of Swedish children from 18 months to five years are looked after in a day-care setting. Day-care subsidies are set at $20,000 annually per child. Which, among other things, explains why Swedish taxes represent among the highest in the world. The day-care system was initiated in 1975, and it took until the 1990s for an evaluation of the success of the program to be undertaken and recognized.

What was recognized was that Swedish health-care professionals cite the lack of parental involvement in their children's upbringing, and the parents' unfamiliarity with child rearing techniques as being responsible for socially dysfunctional children. Swedish youth are exhibiting psychological problems and disorders at a rate far accelerated over their European counterparts. As for educational progress in Swedish schools, they have descended from the top 30 years earlier to average among OECD nations.

Problem behaviours in Swedish schoolchildren far outdistance those of their European counterparts. The ratio of teachers to students is also increasing with deleterious outcomes. Quality service and care has been impeded by the simple fact that Sweden has been involved in a financial crisis. The bold and progressive experiment in state child-rearing has proven to be a failure.

Canadians should have no interest in going down that same dismal road.