A Decade of Disconnection: Child Care Policies in Changing Economic Times in the Canadian Context

Abstract

This article brings together findings from two studies that focus on child care in Canada. The first maps the coverage of child care over the first decade of the 21st century in four Canadian daily newspapers. It shows that the voices of children, mothers, and child care providers are virtually absent from policy discussions. The second study, which remedies the parental invisibility identified by the first study, relies on interviews with mothers of young children in two jurisdictions with distinctive approaches to child care -the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. This article looks at the impact on gender roles, identities, and relations of the rise in women's non-standard, service-sector employment and compares the complex task of creating and managing formal and informal nonparental child care in rural and semi-rural communities in the two policy jurisdictions (Ontario and Quebec). It seeks to understand the ways in which the neo-liberal reconfiguration of local economies affects the experiences of employed, non-urban women with young children -mitigated or exacerbated by provincial policy -through documenting the strategies that mothers adopt to face new, increasing challenges when negotiating this family-market-state nexus. This paper focuses on unique challenges some rural mothers encounter and the strategies they develop to address their changing child care needs. It also shows how absent these realities are from the coverage of child care in Canadian newspapers. The paper argues that high quality child care should be a national priority for healthy child development and better family outcomes.

Can Canadian Women Have it All? How Limited Access to Affordable Child Care Restricts Freedom and Choice

“…As Friendly (2000) states "the labour force participation rate of Canadian women with children aged zero to six has been above 65 per cent for some years" (p.6). Albanese and Rauhala (2015) coincide with this idea stating that "as a result [of the UCCB] in most of the country child spaces remain expensive, in short supply, and are perceived, Can Canadian Women Have it All? both privately and publicly as the individual responsibility of parents" (p. 257).…”

“…In essence, it is the most inclusive child care policy in Canada. Albanese and Rauhala (2015) found that Quebec women's labour force participation rates, which were below the national average in 1976, had surpassed the average by 2005. Additionally, Ferns and Friendly (2014) found that Quebecois parents were paying the lowest daycare fees in the country (Albanese & Rauhala, 2015, p. 255).…”

Critical discourse for critical policy: examining the discursive construction of the childcare policy "problem" in Canadian newspapers between 2008 and 2015

“…While quoting parents may be seen as a progressive, bottom-up approach to policy input, it could be argued that such an approach to reporting occludes the policy-level perspective in which childcare advocates and experts are intimately familiar. Most recently Albanese & Rauhala (2015) merged findings from their ongoing study of newspapers between 2000 and 2007 and qualitative interviews with mothers in rural Ontario and Quebec. The authors note an overall absence of mother's voices in newspaper articles (instead observing the gender neutral terms such as "parents" and/or "families") alongside observations from interviews that mothers experience significant, daily "stress and frustration" due to a lack of high quality, accessible childcare services (Albanese & Rauhala, 2015).…”

“…Canadian mothers continue to cope with the ongoing "stress" and "frustration" of having little support to engage in both paid work and unpaid social reproductive work (Albanese & Rauhala, 2015). During the era of Harper's Conservative government, pan-Canadian "childcare" 3 policy was limited to the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB)a taxable $100 (later $160) per month payable directly to parents for each child under the age of 6.…”

Parameters of Public Policy Change

“…For example, daycare in most countries has become increasingly subject to market forces and is therefore not available to modest and low-income households. Albanese and Rauhala (2015) argue that children, mothers, and child care providers tend to be missing from public policy discussions about daycare. Yet, high quality child care is critical to healthy child development and children's readiness to learn when they begin school.…”