By Susan Lazlo
Adrienne Hamill's piece "Is child-care the answer?" in the previous issue of GLW raises some important issues regarding the federal government's moves to limit affordable, quality child-care. Unfortunately, however, in so doing she makes a number of sweeping generalisations about the current standard of care, and ends up arguing that parents should avoid, if at all possible, using professional child-care.
While I totally disagree with Hamill's conclusions, I share her anger at the Howard government's decision to cut operating grants to community child-care centres and, under the guise of greater "choice", redirect child-care assistance away from centres to parents. Both measures will have a significant impact on community-based centres, which will be forced to hike their charges and reduce their services.
As Hamill points out, cuts of this nature are already beginning to impact adversely on children in care because staff are under more pressure. There is more pressure on centres to employ less "expensive", that is less trained staff , and essential resources, such as toys, educational aids and nappies, will soon have to be provided by parents.
That such under-resourced centres aren't much fun for children is not in dispute. But I take issue with Hamill's far too hasty conclusion that children are therefore better off being cared for — full time — by a parent. This argument feeds directly into the age-old right-wing assertion that females (and Hamill is careful not to stipulate the gender of the parent) are the best nurturers because, after all, isn't this dictated by their biological make-up?
It's hardly surprising in a period of high unemployment and budget cuts that the nature versus nurture argument is rearing its ugly head once again. The latest proponent is former child psychiatrist Dr Peter Cook, who argues in his new book Early Child Care: Infants and Nations at Risk that children who spend their early days in child-care develop more emotional and behavioural problems than infants who are cared for at home. Only mothers, Cook asserts, are capable of providing the type of care required by their young ones.
In a recent interview on the Ray Martin show, Cook went as far as saying that affordable, good quality child-care is "an impossible dream". This will certainly be the case if the Coalition's long-term agenda to privatise child-care is allowed to proceed. But to help businesses make more profits is only half the agenda. The other, more insidious, part is encompassed by the right wing's ideological push on women's "natural" status in society — a theme which always becomes more strident in times of economic downturn.
The simple reason for this push is the amount of unpaid domestic labour carried out mostly by women, equivalent to 60% of GDP (1990 Bureau of Statistics survey). If women didn't fulfil their "natural" role, wages would have to rise to pay for the goods and services that are currently privatised within the family.
Throughout this century, child-care has evolved to become accepted by many as a right to which women are entitled in order to participate more fully in society. Feminists and educators in the 1970s and '80s played an important role in establishing the notion that child-care is a woman's right rather than a privilege or handout.
They also, to a large extent, debunked the myth that women who use child-care are "uncaring" and that it is "unnatural" or "unkind" to children to have some time away from them. This is reinforced by statistics on young children and domestic violence.
According to ABS data published in February, 48% of children aged less than 12 years used some type of child-care. Informal care — that is by relatives other than brothers and sisters and mostly at no financial cost to the parents — is still the most frequently used form of child-care.
Surveys, such as one cited recently by the former sex discrimination officer Sue Walpole, which show that in 1997, only 3% of teenage girls intend to be full-time housewives by 35, indicate just how much ground the right wing has to make up.
Those who argue that parents should avoid using child-care because government cuts have rendered them, at best, inhospitable, unwittingly lend their support to the reactionary agenda of making women feel guilty for going to work. All the evidence suggests that women will stay in the work force — whether by economic necessity or choice — for the foreseeable future.
So rather than surrendering to the lack of quality, affordable child-care, Hamill should be urging us to get active and demand that it be better funded. In my view, children, parents and carers would all stand to benefit.