Universal daycare isn’t a good idea. Specific programs to help children and families in lower-income brackets, or people with various life challenges (self-inflicted or not), I can see. There is research that shows daycare helps those children, at least a little. But your average kid from the average middle-income family? Not so much.
“It’s also the best anti-poverty program. I want every single child in Canada to have the opportunity to get a square meal when they come to daycare; to get loving care and tender care,” Mr. Ignatieff added. “A lot of children in our country, we don’t like to admit it, start in a very turbulent difficult environment at home. The great thing about these programs is they give kids an equal start.”
Mr. Ignatieff is correct in one sense: Studies show that, on average, child care moderately improves the cognitive performance of children from low-income families — and the benefits last into adulthood. On the other hand, the same studies generally have shown no such lifelong benefits for children from middle- and high-income families.
Oh, and in the average normal family, “loving care and tender care” is something kids get at home, not in a government institution. When’s the last time you felt loved by a government bureaucrat?
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Thanks for posting about this, Brigitte: I try to keep my day job, in which I research child care, and my after-hours life, PWPL, separate. But on a day when a politician follows up an announcement about daycare with one about abortion that becomes difficult, to say the least.
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