Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Early childhood education 127
limited to the North American context. Quality appears to be a universal worry, with
many European states making trade-offs between quality and accessibility. Disparities in
the accessibility and quality of child care, particularly the sharp dichotomy between
“warehousing” and education-based models, become less tolerable as we begin to view
early childhood education as a natural extension of primary and secondary education. We
investigate these problems below.
Accessibility
Accessibility to child care has two aspects. The first is the availability or supply of child
care. The second is the affordability of the child care that is supplied. The supply of child
care services varies greatly depending on location, the age of the children seeking care
and the dominant socio-economic level of local residents. Most OECD countries struggle
to maintain an adequate supply of child care despite a signiflcant increase in spaces in
some jurisdictions. 46 However, the chief obstacle to accessibility is affordability. Even
where child care services are available, many parents cannot afford access to high-quality
day-care programs—often as a result of one of many faulty modes of government
financing.
Low-income access to well-regulated centres is usually possible only through targeted
government subsidies with onerous means-tested thresholds. 47 In the alternative, tax
credits (as per the US) and tax deductions (as per Canada) do little to alleviate
affordability problems for disadvantaged children. Tax deductions are only valuable to
individuals who earn enough to pay taxes at a high marginal rate in the first place, and are
therefore worth little to parents with modest incomes. 48 The result is perversely
regressive: child care expenses are subsidized less for the poor and the middle class than
for the wealthy. Purely public provision of child care also has its pitfalls. Many public
child care systems continue to experience waiting lists, despite high spending levels. 49
Public care also poses accessibility problems for certain citizen groups. For instance,
public child care services often run on a Monday to Friday daytime model, with
significant summer breaks and other vacation periods. 50 So-called “atypical” parents
whose work schedules do not conform to this pattern may be left with no government
support whatsoever. 51 Solutions to the “atypical” parent problem include both direct cash
benefits and employer participation. Direct cash benefits are offered by many European
countries to offset child care costs. Unfortunately, “the parents most likely to use this
cash benefit and stay at home with their children are lone mothers, mothers with several
children, and mothers in low-income one-earner families.” 52 These parents may prefer
cash in hand to child care, short-changing on the early education of their children. High
levels of employer-employee provision of day care services, as in the Netherlands, 53 may
address “atypical” accessibility concerns as well as inject employer funding into child
care services. However, employer programs are, at base, a tax on employers and therefore
on employment. This also creates new tiers of accessibility, as between the employed and
the unemployed, and as between employees whose employers may vary in their
commitment to early childhood education. Private provision in the absence of
government support is little better and arguably worse. In the United States, for example,
the average annual cost of child care services per child is $4,500 (Canadian),
unaffordable for low-income families. 54