Should working mums have priority? - CareforKids.com.au®
Chronic shortage of care for under 2s
Should working mums have priority?
It's the eternal dilemma: who is most in need of child care and should scarce places be prioritised for children of working mums? While the majority of places in child care centres are taken up by children whose parents both work to some extent, there are also many children whose parents do not both work, but who attend child care for social or educational reasons, or simply for parent respite.
The Productivity Commission's proposed changes to the child care rebate/child care benefit to include other forms of qualified carers, may have an impact on the shortage of places, if the changes come into play, but for the time being child care for the under twos will remain in critically short supply and is getting more and more expensive.
If you're a mum who desperately needs to get back to work, but can't find a child care place for love nor money in your neighbourhood or near your workplace, this lack of places poses a huge problem.
In many urban and suburban areas around key cities, the shortage means that some women are simply unable to go back to work, having to extend maternity leave or even admit defeat and take redundancy until child care places open up to them. This is most likely to be detrimental to their career, not to mention the family income.
So is it fair that some of these much-needed places are taken up by children whose mums are not working? And would the situation be helped with means testing – filtering out those who need child care for work by making those families who can pay, pay with proposed reduced rebate levels?
Should child care places be allocated in the same way that child care benefit is distributed, i.e. priority to those children whose mothers are working or studying or looking for work for a minimum of 16 hours over a fortnight?
Perhaps the answer is the development of more occasional care facilities that offer child care specifically to those children whose mums need ad hoc child care or regular, but only one day or a morning a week, leaving the full time child care centres to provide places for under twos whose mums need to work?
Clearly allocating child care places to children of working mums will mean that there are no places left for children whose mums are not working but who feel their children would benefit from a couple of days a week of socialising and development in child care?
Studies have shown that children who attend formal child care are better equipped when it comes to starting school; are often quicker to learn core subjects – the three Rs - due to formal pre-school programs in their child care centres and for this reason many mums enrol their kids in child care, even if they don't need it for work purposes. However this tends to be for children over 3. So perhaps there is a case for not offering "social" places to children until they are 3 or over.
For children under two whose parents don't work, the main reason they attend is to give mum some "time off" during the week in order to get essential chores and errands done, or to take part in exercise or a group or to simply have a few quiet hours without small children. Let's face it we can all identify with that.
Working mums vs stay at home mums aside, however, it cannot be argued that there simply aren't enough places for the under twos and something has to be done.
Currently the Productivity Commission's proposed changes include:
Extending rebate and child care benefit to all legitimate forms of child care
Simplifying the child care benefit/rebate
Increasing subsidies for occasional care services
Widening eligibility for in home care
These proposed changes, put forward from the initial Productivity Commission's interim report, will not be known until the government decides which policies or changes to adopt.
Until then working and non-working mums will continue to fight over child care places.
We'd love to hear your thoughts to the following dilemma question:
If there is one place left in a child care service, should it be given to a working or non-working mum?
