We are calling on you to work together to honour the promise of a national child care program. The place to start is by protecting the early learning and child care agreements between the Government of Canada and the provinces. The federal-provincial agreements on child care were negotiated in good faith. They lay a foundation for a full system of early learning and child care that can meet the needs of all Canadian families. Canceling them sets back the development of a national child care program for years to come, leaving families with young children to fend for themselves. Breaking federal-provincial child care agreements would be a breach of public trust and would lead to a cut of almost $4 billion from child care funding. The federal election results were not a mandate to turn back the clock on child care. While income support for families is a valid policy goal, a taxable family allowance and a tax credit for employers will not create early learning and child care services that are high quality, available and affordable. Families need income supports and publicly funded child care services. We call on all governments to protect and enhance progress on child care.
Perhaps some of you would care to add your signature to this plea.
Note: here
Stumble It!
national day care system. Thanks for taking the time to do this.
" Something unfashionable became fashionable during the early 1980's, and I'm not talking about greed, junk bonds, or Ronald Reagan. But rather, this is something that is truly detestable, yet is a part of American culture every bit as much as Saturday morning cartoons or Sunday church. The fad that I speak of is child daycare.
Daycare, slowly evolving throughout the 70's, became the rage of the 80's as two-income households became the norm in middle-class America. After all, during this time we watched tax rates creep upward and personal responsibility creep downward, while Mom trotted off to work, and Dad came home from his job and changed diapers and vacuumed carpets.
These days, what we are witnessing is the first full generation of daycare kids having grown up. This is a generation clearly lacking in virtue, morals, discipline, and classical education. We complain about this all the time; of how young people today – in general – are so disrespectful of adults and so culturally repulsive in their preferences, behavior and dress.
After all, what we observe is a generation full of baggy pants five sizes too big, frosted hair cut into bizarre twists, and body piercings, where kids, and not all of them so young, deform their faces and heads and private parts with two-dollar silver bits purchased in filthy backrooms. Tattoos, obnoxious and unfeminine, adorn our young women's bodies, making them look like backwater tramps straight out of long-term incarceration. The music they listen to, from Marilyn Manson to trash-rap, reveals that we have, indeed, raised a generation of humans that have little respect for the spirituality of life. The kids call this "individualism". I call it collective rubbish. What we now witness is daycare brats becoming adults.
I suppose parents thought little ill effect would come to their children as they dumped them, daily, into the hands of strangers, to be watched over, played with, and fed by these strangers at daycare centers that soon became substitute parents.
The picture of a typical daycare family is an absurd one: rising early, the house is bustling with stressed-out parents trying to get the children ready to be carted off, while they also grapple with their own preparations for work and the stress that already awaits them in their workplace. Amidst the stress of typical child antics in the morning, Mom is trying to clothe and feed everyone while she tries to clothe and feed herself for a power day at the office. Thinking about it, how much quality attention can the kids really get when Mom is wrapped up in preparing herself mentally for a long day at work or her meeting with the CFO?
The soccer Mom, as she is typically dubbed, speeds over to daycare, drops the kids off at 7am, and gets to the office by eight o'clock. Working until 6pm, Mom rips out of the office, having fallen behind in her work again today, but has no choice but to get to the daycare center to pick up the kids by 7pm, because Dad will be working late tonight. By the time she arrives home, the kids are restless, misbehaving, and it is 7:30 or so before Mom and the kids pile out of the Explorer and into the house.
Now, depending on the age of the kids and their bedtimes, Mom has approximately a couple of hours to spend with the kids. If dinner is prepared and cooked at home, then we can assume that most of that time is taken up doing just that, all at a frantic pace, because Mom is hungry and tired, Dad has just come home, and the kids are impatient.
Where, in all this commotion, can parents possibly find time to share themselves with their children? After cooking and eating? Or is that time taken up with housecleaning, fielding phone calls, maintaining the house, shopping, paying bills, and just plain getting one's bearings in order? And of course, this cycle repeats itself daily, as the children are left with what little time remains after all the necessary tasking is done.
These are horrible circumstances for any child to have to bear. Already, the kids experience stress and chaos as a normal part of their daily routine. Life's little enjoyments, like quiet-time and personal reflection are not even in the cards for kids growing up in this family disorder. And then, add to that the numerous planned activities like soccer, dance class, gymnastics, and hockey, and you have a family that is no longer the epitome of a family unit. Rather, they find themselves spread out, each covering his or her own individual activities, and coming together only under rare circumstances.
Now I know it is not always possible for a woman to stay home with the children, either because of economic circumstances or career choices. What I do know is that parents have choices to make regarding their children, choices that need to be made before bringing those children into the world. Parents are responsible for being attentive to their children, and raising them as best they can. They are responsible for providing them with the emotional and intellectual tools they will need to grow in the world. Only parents and close family can do that for a child, not the daycare centers.
At the daycare center, parents entrust their children to strangers; strangers that have provided them with a babysitting rate that was probably cheaper than the other daycare centers they visited upon. At these centers, young people who are paid low wages and who are, typically, poorly trained, usually provide the childcare. The childcare may be lax, it may be inattentive, or it may simply be abusive, but it may be difficult for parents to gauge the overall quality of the services.
In a typical daycare unit, there are numerous children with few supervisors. Whatever the laws for supervision may be, it is not sufficient to replace real parenting.
As a child, I placed a great premium on quiet-time and time spent alone indulging in my solo interests. Whether the order of the day was creating some new artwork or reading my books, or writing a story or listening to my records, it was something I found necessary for my peace of mind, and for the growth of my intellectual capabilities. After school, I remember running home as fast as I could and bursting into the house, heading straight for my room and all my little tasks that lay before me. It was as much fun planning those activities as it was doing them. I felt a sense of security and comfort, since I knew Mom was there, and therefore, everything was going to be all right. I ran home because I knew it was a place that I wanted to be. Now, kids don’t run home to Mom anymore, because they have the latchkey stopover that comes between school and home. The security of Mom may come hours after school is over. During the summer months, for me, it was a whole day of various things to do; things I wanted to do. I never could have survived a moment as a daycare kid.
Can one who grew up like I did even imagine living the chaos of the daycare center life? Gaggles of kids, some screaming and some crying, some fighting and some sick, all letting loose in an atmosphere void of parents, control, or set discipline. Even if there exists a sense of discipline, where can a child get any peace, for instance, to read or write or study, or to develop artistic or musical talents?
There is no peace, for a daycare kid is trapped in a ritual of group games, group projects, and group trips. The activities are planned, as are lunchtime and naptime. Solo time, however, is not planned because it does not exist. A child is forced into this groupthink whether he likes it or not. He has no access to his own "things", his own comforts that he chooses, or his own hobbies. He's there to be babysat and to go along with the rest of the group on its little projects, no matter how uninteresting he may find them. And he is expected to do that for eight, ten, twelve hours a day, every day.
What happens to a high-IQ child who is squeezed into this environment daily, as his time revolves around activity after activity set around a group? How does the child become nurtured to use his God-given gifts? He doesn't, you can bet. In the groupthink atmosphere of childcare, the bright child is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in the group, and he is not allowed to go off independent of the group and think as he might, do as he might, and create as he wants.
I know if I had grown up in this hellish environment, I may have been part of the whole body-piercing, tattooing thing out of a lack of respect for anyone, let alone myself. It's an awful environment to put kids in, and yet, expect them to come out of it behaving as respectable and civilized adults.
The daycare-oriented society, instead, nurtures fiends that hang in groups – at the malls, at the schools, in techno clubs, drug-and-sex parties, and in the streets. They look like bums and they sniff glue, poisonous solvents, and suck in helium to get their kicks. They take ecstasy to remove themselves from reality and listen to creep music to display their own unhappiness.
We adults cannot expect kids to grow unless we give them the time and space to do it. In the daycare environment into which parents thrust their children, there is no space and there is no opportunity for personal growth. There is only a low-paid babysitter who sticks you in the midst of the growth pattern of a dozen other kids. It's almost like raising kids has become akin to raising rabbits or hamsters.
Parents have simply got to take responsibility for the rearing of their own children, and they have got to be willing to sacrifice their own wants in order to do so. Their priorities need to shift from satellite dishes, two new cars, and houses full of electronics, to a more attentive environment in which kids can have their abilities nourished and realize their intellectual potential."
I'll finish this by saying that the parents of today seem to have very little tolerance for the oddities of children. Any kid that doesn't "fit in" gets labelled as "sick", and perhaps gets forced into "therapy" or, if they are really unlucky, behavioural modifying drugs for non-existent diseases like ADHD. If governments really wanted to help the genuinely destitute why don't they consider replacing the welfare state with some kind of negative income tax, something which does not necessarily involve massive increases in social control? Not much chance of that. Too many social workers and headshrinkers would be out of a job.
Well the solution then is very simple. The answer is not to pour money into national daycare centres. The government focus should clearly be placed into technological research to develop a time machine to transport the entire Canadian population back to the 1950's.
But wait, didn't that environment produce all those long-haired hippy-freak weirdos in the 1960's doing LSD, and any other drug they could get their hands on? And even with all that solo time, and quality time spent with mother and father in domestic bliss, they still ended up congregating in large stadiums and open fields in grossly mis-matched outfits to listen to the demon rock and roll and, rumour has it, also engage in pre-marital sex.
Hmmm....perhaps the 1940's would be better. But of course there was a war on...so maybe not. Gotta think about this for a bit.....there MUST be an era and technique that produced perfect children!
I have to say that I agree with the general tone of this reply, if not some of the conclusions. I understand that some in families both parents must work to make ends meet but I have a problem with government sponsored child care in general, the government or for that matter the taxpayers did not conceive this child. Sponsored child care is not AND WILL NEVER BE universally available to everyone, rural residents / workers in particular will never have local government day care centers, they will be concentrated in the towns and cities. What of those that work at home, on the farm, in their own business, will this day care be readily available to them? If we MUST subsidize the raising of YOUR children then ,although I hate to say it, I agree with Harpers approach, putting cash in the hands of parents to use to either stay at home and raise their own kids, pay a neighborhood mom, or a relation to look after their child OR help pay for formal child care at a “center” (where available) makes MUCH more sense to me. That is further reinforced by the cost per child within these multi child regulated facilities as compared with individual care by a chosen individual.
If we provide subsidies for raising children there are only two criteria I can see that are viable FAIR options. 1) Provide it for ALL parents of children of a certain age irregardless of whether they chose to work out or stay home and irregardless of whom they chose to give the care of their child to. 2) Same as above but on a sliding scale depending upon FAMILY income as is the current GST and child allowance payments.
As a rural resident who has raised two great kids on a single (sometimes VERY small) income, has never turned to social assistance despite difficult times, and yes, was very grateful for that government cheque, I do not speak of this without some knowledge in this area. Child care by others in exchange for a second job was never a viable option for us, either for economic, availability or quality of care reasons.
It is time WE ALL stopped relying on government to bail us out for every little problem and start taking RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR OWN ACTIONS. There will always be need for some support for those who are in dire straights due to no fault of their own but far too many citizens are relying on the taxpayers to support their CHOICES in life.
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When you are up to your ass in alligators it is difficult to remember that the initial objective was to drain the swamp
Having said this, In my own personal experience, I experienced the brunt of just this sort of attempt to stigmatise daycare kids, only in reverse. As a stay at home mom, I was met with shock and horror that my child wasn't properly socialized like children in daycare and was met with attitudes that suggested I was raising "ferral" children who were denied the daycare experience. I don't find either outlook particularly valid. I figure everyone makes the decision and does their best and that stay at home or daycare is just one more variable in the total parenting package, rather than a solid indicator of how children will "turn out". As far a a NDC program, it might be better to provide incentive in terms of money like Harper has promised and tax breaks for stay at home parents.
The part of the peice you posted, I did find true was about parents not haveing time for the oddities of children and wanting to cure their childhood with pharmacueticals. I have found the public school system more guilty of this than parents. First day of Kindergarten, my daughter comes home with numerous codes of conduct and other "contracts" that required her signature. Good intentions aside, I remember thinking that perhaps she needed her own laywer first. It hasn't changed much, and now in grade 3 she has two minute speeches to recite from memory, and can spell words I learned in Junior High. Children don't get much of a childhood these days, is what I think.
Rural, you said:
>If we provide subsidies for raising children there are only two criteria I can see that are viable FAIR options. 1) Provide it for ALL parents of children of a certain age irregardless of whether they chose to work out or stay home and irregardless of whom they chose to give the care of their child to. 2) Same as above but on a sliding scale depending upon FAMILY income as is the current GST and child allowance payments.
How about if the government were to allow us to keep more of the money that we work for, that parents would be able to decide for themselves whether
a] They wish to spend the extra money they would then have on day-care or
b] Decide that they have more money to live on, so a second income is no longer required?
Basically works out to what you were saying, but cuts out the middle-man. I don't need the Government taking my money away only to return it in another form later. Same goes for GST and child allowance payments.
Rico AB.
Forget the politicos, for a moment, as they have become the hand maidens to those of who I speak.
It is the super rich who own the banks, oil, law, education, jobs and all else you care to name!
Apply Henry David Thoreau’s insightful and now ignored observation,
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
For anyone following the topics here, I must assume for sanities sake, the connection are being made and at least some of the readership is leaving re-active for pro –active
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
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to realise our knowledge is ignorance is a noble thought.
To regard our ignorance as knowledge-
This is mental illness
Lao-Tzo