Child Care Debate Hots Up

Anne Manne, an early childhood expert debunks some of the current let's have more and earlier childcare myths in the Australian.

According to the childcare lobby, for every $1 invested in child care, $7 are saved by the prevention of crime and delinquency, while ensuring school success. The Australian political elite has swallowed this "fact" hook, line and sinker, with both leading parties out-competing each other over money for child care.

For it is in such early learning programs, the argument goes, that crucial brain development delivered by expert childcare workers will give children a head start.

One has to hand it to the lobbyists. Put the child into day care early, the longer hours the better and, presto, those lil 'ol brain synapses start snapping. The reality is different. The potent stress hormone cortisol has been found in children's saliva in centre-based day care. One recent British study found that on entry into child care, separated babies had cortisol levels between 75 and 100 per cent 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.

Let's take that bogus, much quoted claim that for every $1 invested, $7 is returned. That comes from the US-based Perry Preschool, a carefully targeted, high quality intervention project offering 12 hours a week of care, home visits and parent education to impoverished, profoundly disadvantaged children from chaotic families whose parents were borderline intellectually disabled. It was not for infants, but for three and four-year-olds. It was not ordinary day care.

That's a long way from the have-it-all generation of affluent parents putting a six-week-old baby in child care, 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. One visiting overseas developmentalist rightly described such care as a "licence for neglect". The Perry Preschool it ain't.

International scholarly literature shows that far from an inevitable benefit, the younger the child and the longer the hours, the higher the risk. The most sophisticated study, by US National Child Health and Development, involving more than 1000 children, revealed that by age 4 1/2, three times as many children (17 per cent) who had experienced more than 30 hours of child care a week from infancy had emotional and behavioural problems, compared with those who experienced less than 10 hours a week (6 per cent).

The more child care, the more problems, including "getting into many fights, showing cruelty, bullying or meanness to others, physically attacking other people and being explosive, showing unpredictable behaviour".

Meanwhile in other parts of the world, the emphasis is on workplace flexibility and paid parental leave. There is an almost complete disconnect between science and politics on the childcare question. It is sensible policy, not fairy stories, that parents need most.