The case favouring public daycare at the expense of homecare is based on the contention that children fare better, both educationally and otherwise, in settings under the care and supervision of trained educationalists. This is certainly what Children’s Minister, Katherine Zappone, would have us believe. However, Dr Catherine Hakim, British social scientist and herself a feminist, like Zappone, disagrees.
Zappone has, of course, just introduced a scheme whereby daycare will be subsidised by the State up to a certain income level, with the promise of more to come. Parents who don’t use daycare (the majority) can go sing for their supper.
In total contradiction of Zappone and her supporters, Hakim, in an article in the Irish Daily Mail last month, entitled “A Betrayal of Families”, says there is no real evidence that daycare is best over the long term.
She states, there “is a large degree of wishful thinking in the idea that babies given into public daycare from a young age will thrive better than in the one-to-one personal interaction, typical of family based care.”
Regarding outcomes for children, she says that “numerous studies deliver conflicting or equivocal evidence” on this point. Even claims that disadvantaged children from poorer families were most likely to benefit from daycare were not conclusive. For instance, programs in the US such as Head Start and Perry Preschool seemed to show better educational outcomes for disadvantaged children who had attended pre-school. In reality, however, “the long-term results from such hot-housing schemes are weak. Children can learn fast by themselves and they generally make up any deficit as they grow older.” The only enduring benefits for such children were non-educational: “In the States, the main long-term benefits of the Head Start scheme were essentially social: children were less likely to engage in crime.”
More recent studies in Finland also failed to show any lasting educational benefit from nurseries. “A 2015 study by the University of Helsinki compared educational outcomes for children who attended public daycare with children whose parents used the homecare allowance—which generally means family based care. Educational attainment at age 15 was much the same in the two groups. Differences in scores were non-existent or tiny and of no substantive importance.” By age 21, both groups were equally likely to have gone on to third level education. Even for children from disadvantaged backgrounds the study “failed to show that nurseries were significantly more helpful in the long run”.
Not only is homecare good for children but, she said, it is also preferred by many parents. “Research invariably shows that in an ideal world, most mothers prefer to look after their pre-school children, either full-time or part-time”. Dr Hakim suggests that ideology is the driving force behind the push for daycare, even though, “ideologically driven policies fare poorly compared with evidence based policies that ‘go with the grain’ of what parents and voters really want.”
She continues: “Childcare and women’s roles have been particular victims of the nanny state telling people how they should live. Part and parcel of accepting social diversity is accepting that people may choose different styles of family life.”
She concludes: “The idea that all women should be in full-time work, just like men, is too dirigiste for the 21st century. The diversity of lifestyles, and family styles, means such policies are guaranteed to fail. One-size-fits-all is a blinkered, unimaginative approach to modern policymaking.”
Dr Catherine Hakim is currently a research fellow at the London think tank Civitas. She was previously at the London School of Economics. She is the joint author of Little Britons: Financing Childcare Choice, published by Policy Exchange, which can be accessed online here [1].