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The McDonalds of Child Care? Or A Welcome Relief for Working Parents?

by kate baggott on October 30th, 2007

My co-citizens in Canada are worried about the arrival of “big box” day care in Canada. Here is one comment on the plan to open ABC Learning Centres, run by an Australian company, from the Toronto Star.

• “Our biggest concern is that foreign owned big-box child care is going to drive a stake through any notion of a national child-care system,” said Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents some 7,000 Canadian child-care workers.
• “We intend to make child care an election issue.”
• Moist said the union will tap into a $5 million anti-privatization war chest to fund the fight and lobby government to keep public daycare subsidies away from for-profit child care.

I’ve never had to find day care in Canada, but this is what I understand is typical right now:

For the first year of life, most children have a parent on maternity or paternity leave. This is true only for employed people. Self-employed or marginally self-employed contractors are, like everywhere, screwed out of this benefit. Maternity and paternity leave payments are made by the Employment Insurance plan and even though self-employed people have to pay into the plan, they don’t get to collect.

Most children start school at the age of four for half the day. If their parents are lucky, the children get a spot in a school-age daycare in the school they attend. Otherwise, they might attend an off-site daycare or home daycare where the daycare worker comes to pick all the children up.

Between the ages of one and three, children either have a stay-at-home parent, a grandparent as a care-giver, the attend a public day care that recieves provincial subsidies, a private day care that may have some subsidized spots, or a home day care run by a stay-at-home mother. Caregivers in private and public day cares have 3-year college diplomas in Early Childhood Education. In fact, most home daycare providers also have an ECE or equivalent certification and always planned to open a home daycare when they had their own children.

It is a patchwork collection of programs with a few problems. Not all home daycares have been inspected. Anyone can “babysit” and desperate parents might hire a home day care with an unfenced swimming pool in the backyard or some other dangerous condition that should not exist where there are small children present. There often aren’t enough public day care spaces and private day care centres tend to be small, have strong pedigogical structures and can be very expensive. Also, children at home with parents or grandparents who haven’t attended even library or drop-in programs often have a lot of catching up to do in terms of language and social development when they start school. Some don’t speak any English or French at all.

That said, most people seem to be deeply uncomfortable with huge, privately-owned, for-profit day care. Can an early childhood educator who has to care for up to 20 little children provide adequate supervision, not to mention language and learning stimulation?

Have you used any of the so-called big box day care centers where you live? Should Canadians be worried or is big box day care a solution to current day care problems?

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