Is childcare good for children?

Posted: 5 April 2013

The Australian Federal Government recently announced that it will introduce a package of new measures to provide more flexible and accessible childcare to better meet the needs of what it calls “modern families”. The $11 million trials will include overnight and weekend care for the children of shift workers, extended weekday hours and more out of school hours care to “remove the barriers to workforce participation”. The media release, issued by the Minister for Childcare, was seasoned with references to how the trial responds to the needs of families and helps parents in the “work/family juggle”. The Minister spoke about the way in which the significant growth in women’s workforce participation in recent decades had created extra demand for childcare.

And demand it has created. There are around 6500 childcare centres in Australia offering long day care (from early morning to early evening) and the number of centres is increasing by about 250 centres per year. That of course means the number of clients are on the rise with 1.9 million children in 2011 attending one or more types of childcare, which was just over half of Australian children aged 12 or younger.

Without a doubt childcare is seen as an acceptable and even a socially responsible path. Reports are seen in the media from time-to-time extolling the value that quality childcare can bring in the well being of children. The studies seem to indicate that the more time childcare staff spend being actively engaged with the children, the better their social and emotional development. One expert on child development was quoted as saying the highest quality childcare is provided in those centres where the children are “loved to bits”. What? Have we reached such a place where the most obvious data seems to surprise us? The fact that children need to be loved and given attention is the most basic piece of human programming yet it is as if we are discovering it afresh.

What is most discouraging though is that in all the talk of childcare – from government ministers to journalists to university academics – no one seems to be able (or willing) to annunciate the elephant in the room. And that elephant is that children fare best within the care of their parents, and in most circumstances that primary care is usually given through the mother. Yet instead of highlighting the essential nature of parents in the direct raising of their children, the federal government assigns a special minister to childcare and proceeds to undertake trials that will essentially allow parents to be more absent from their children than ever before.

Allow me to say that I am not criticising those who work in childcare, the families who opt to use childcare or mothers who work. What I want to point out is the strange disconnect that seems exists. Too many people seem very intent on making us all feel good about childcare and as far as I can see the reason for this is simply to keep women in workforce participation. Without a doubt our society needs women in various positions of employ meaning that there will be times when the children of these mothers will need to be looked after, hence the genuine need for childcare. But with half of Australian children in some form of regular childcare one can’t help but wonder if we have inverted our priorities as a nation.

Childcare is not the sign of a healthy nation. If all the mothers of Australia went to work tomorrow that would not be an asset. Any nation is best served by having young children with their parents. The government boasts about its investment of $23.1 billion into early childhood education and care, but where is the allocation to assist mothers to stay at home to be with their children? A mother may opt to work and that is her prerogative but too many find themselves having to work to pay the bills. Too many mothers receive subliminal messages that their value and worth is to be found in paid employment. This is an unfortunate lie. Children need their mothers, not part time, but full time. A healthy nation needs its mothers being mothers. We speak of childcare as if it is normal to take a toddler and leave them in the care of strangers (however genuine and well trained they might be) in their most formative years. A nation that is overly proud of its achievements in burgeoning childcare numbers has truly missed the point.

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Why Eat at the Dinner Table?

Posted: 24 June 2012

Where did your family eat dinner last night? In front of the TV? In the car on the way to sport? At McDonalds? At the dinner table? A survey taken a few years ago in the US, Canada and Britain, found that about a quarter of adults with children under the age of 18 ate dinner together at home seven nights a week. Another quarter said they ate together three or fewer nights a week. I am going to surmise that Australian households would not be too far off those figures.

Once upon a time (not that long ago) we know that the situation was different. Each night the dining table would be set with a simple cloth and serviettes, the cutlery and crockery would be laid out and as ‘dinner time’ neared an increasing number of hungry mouths would appear with the question, “what’s for dinner”?

What accounts for this decline in families eating together today though? The data seems to point to two main issues: Overworked parents and overscheduled children. When mum and dad get home in the evening they are soon in the car again to whisk the children off to sport, music, tutoring, church activities and a host of other events.

This nightly ritual around the dinner table however is both vital and fruitful: it is what anchors a family together. Sure, the conversation is not always profound and children argue and fidget. And sometimes the deepest and most meaningful times in a family are not at the table at all. However, even with all that in mind there is something unique about the time a family spends around the dinner table eating a meal together.

The security of the dinner table is a central place for the family to return to whether the times are joy filled, sorrowful or somewhere in between. It is the place where the family builds an identity. Stories are passed down, jokes exchanged and the wider world is examined through the lens of the family’s values. Children pick up vocabulary and a sense of how conversation is structured. They learn good manners and proper etiquette, something that will set them up for life. Meal time is often the time that families pray together. Dinner time is not ‘parent time’ or ‘children time’ but it is truly ‘family time’. Coming back daily to the same place helps instill familiarly. When a family closes their front door to world each night and sits down together around the table, they are subliminally stating, ‘this is what is most important to us; this is where we truly exist.’

Striving for regular family meals is not mere idealism. Experts in adolescent development are the ones who are saying that the daily investment in family time pays the largest dividends. Studies show that the more families eat together, the less likely the children are to smoke, drink, take drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables and learn how to socialise. One anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey stated, “If it were just about food, we would squirt it into their mouth with a tube. A meal is about civilising children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture”. You might recall the riots in England in 2011, to what extent would that have happened if families were at home having dinner? Especially in an era when divorce and family breakdown are at such high levels, the need becomes all the more urgent for children and parents to set down together and get to know each other once again.

There is no one-size-fits-all for families in regards meal times but it might be of benefit to really take a hard look at your family routine. Is it overbooked? Are you tired and frantic? Will your children be better off with more activities in their week? Why not cut back on a few activities and spend some unstructured time with your family? Start by planning some stay at home family dinners together. Set the table, turn off the TV and enjoy a meal together. Just a thought.

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How well do you know your Family?

Posted: 11 January 2012

Welcome to 2012! Did you have a restful break from work…or did you have a break at all? Did you know that at the end of 2011, Australian workers have stockpiled 129.6 million days of annual leave! It matches the recent conversation I had with a man who admitted that he had not taken annual leave for three years even though he has a young family. His response as to why, was that he liked being at work and would not know what to do otherwise (I guess that if one had not taken a break for that long, one may forget what to do with the time).

This does make me wonder though, why we are not taking breaks. It is good that we like our work but why are we not going home? Could it be that it becomes easier to be at work than to engage with the family?

In our homes and amongst our families we also have work that must be done and it is not mowing the lawn or tidying the house. The real work is the work of building up a community, a place where love is received by each member of the family and a place where each member is able to give love.

At the end of last year I spent one month away leading a residential course for twenty young adults from around Australia. During the month the participants receive many different aspects of formation but apart from everything what makes the event so transformative is the strong community that is formed. These young people that begin as strangers end up as lifelong friends and not only because they lived together for a month, but because they shared their lives at a deep level, their joys and their weaknesses, their hopes and their fears. So close does the group become that by the end it is a challenge for them to settle back into home with their own families. However, if our families were as strong as they should be that month would not seem so extraordinary. In this course there is no TV, no phones, no internet, no iPods and at each meal we eat together. In free time we play cards, board games and talk to one another. We have events in which each person publically honours someone else in the community. Much planning goes into this course but everything that is done there should be and can be done in the family; it is the work of a family.

Many of us may be living with our family under the one roof, but that does not mean we know anyone in our family. Each time I travel on the train there are people sitting and reading magazines about the latest celebrity news. I often wonder if they would score higher in a quiz about a celebrity or in a quiz about someone in their own family. How would you score in a quiz about the members of your family?

Just as one can be married but not really have a marriage, one can be in a family but not really have a family. If our family life only exists by default because we live in the same house then perhaps this New Year is the time to address the situation. And the solution is not complicated. It begins by opening up channels in when we have opportunities to share in one another’s lives. That is why the dinner table should is the most crucial piece of furniture in the house. The dinner table is the place where daily lives are shared, and not necessarily the major events but more importantly the minor ones, the details that only a family really have an interest in. For when we have a place to share our insignificant stories we have room to share the significant crossroads of life. Once the family is secure around the table it begins to make sense to share weekends and holidays together.

When we feel we belong to a family then our weekends and annual leave becomes valuable time to spend not just with the family but as a family, not doing but being. The work of building up the family then takes on its own joys that put the paid work we do during business hours into perspective. We begin to see that work exists for us; we do not exist for work. So if you are the owner of some of those 129.6 million days of annual leave perhaps give some thought to trading them in for time with your family in the coming year.

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