Shannon Proudfoot: Politicians have repeatedly referred to childcare as a mother’s problem, undermining the essential fact that we all have skin in this game.
Well, that, in the internet parlance of our day, escalated rapidly.
On Monday, upset by some of the talking points I heard in the announcement of a historic child care agreement between Alberta and the federal government, I tweeted is:
Childcare is important to all working parents, it’s not a women’s boutique affair for the love of God.
– Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) November 15, 2021
A thousand retweets and 9,000 likes later, I guess I’m not the only one frustrated by the way childcare is framed so often.
That press conference in Edmonton was set up for the purpose of announcing a $ 3.8 billion settlement that the federal government says will cut Alberta’s daycare fees by an average of half by the end of next year, on the way to creating of 42,500 new regulated spaces and providing $ 10 a day Child Care by 2026. Achieving that deal means Ontario and New Brunswick are now the only provinces holding out, as Ottawa tries to make its social infrastructure project a plan National Early Childhood Education and Care. .
Against a predictably noisy thematic backdrop of young children frolicking at a YMCA (subtext: “Do you Do you want this to happen around you while you are trying to work? ”), Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said:“ Taking care of children is vitally important to our economy. It is as critical a piece of infrastructure as a highway, grain elevator or railroad ”, before adding:“ Childcare is important to all Canadian women, children and families ”.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the last year and a half has made clear how important it is to have support for children and families so that parents can work. “Not just for families, not just for those young children to get the best start in life they can, not just for moms who all too often face impossible decisions about whether to be there for their children or to contribute to their family and their lives. community, ”he said, but businesses of all sizes know that child care is essential to the economy.
Karina Gould, the minister for family, children and social development, launched a similar message, saying that this plan would be “good for fathers, especially mothers.”
Now look, I’m being a little stingy in singling out these federal politicians as they present targets of opportunity this week, because this line of rhetoric that childcare is inherently a mother’s problem is so common that it’s pretty ubiquitous.
But it’s strange and immensely counterproductive that even in conversations that claim to be progressive, babysitting is often casually presented as a women’s boutique theme. You know, something for the ladies, in case they want to sell Tupperware to make money while Junior is in their playgroup. This message only reinforces the idea that children are the natural domain and default responsibility of their mothers, which is presumably not what the architects of this national child care plan are looking for.
It also transforms the critical public infrastructure childcare that the Trudeau government has repeatedly described and recasts as a special social policy treatment that we throw at women. That seriously undermines the message that this is an essential livelihood that will have immense benefits for society as a whole, both economically and socially.
The interruption of the pandemic has set women’s employment gains back by decades, in a disconcertingly long-standing phenomenon that economist Armine Yalnizyan has called “she-assignment. “But there is a subtle but important difference between recognizing that women are more likely than men to quit their jobs or cut their hours to fill the gaps in childcare, and making childcare appear to be a problem. a service only for women, because so are the children themselves. One of those messages nods to a set of economic, social, and personal pressures that need to be equalized; the other makes it appear that this is all a state of irrevocable and justified things.
This strikes me as a variation of high achievers being asked ad nauseam how they balance work and family life, while high achievers are asked that on the 10th of Never. All of this treats working fathers as the norm and working mothers as special cases or curiosities. And it treats mothers concerned, committed to, and sacrificing for the well-being of their children and families as the default, and fathers who work doing the same as mythological creatures. It is also not true; both are destructive.
Honestly, the flood of responses to my tweet took me by surprise, and many of them made different versions of the same excellent point: that when it comes to early learning and child care, everybody have skin in this game. People who do not have children and never intend to say that childcare matters to them, so their colleagues who is it so Parents can focus and be available at work, knowing that their children are well cared for. Employers, managers, and bosses of all stripes said they care for the same reason, or because they will one day employ the adults that daycare children grow up in, so enrolling them in stable, quality programs is an investment in the future.
Of course, in practice, many of these childcare burdens continue to be borne disproportionately by women. But that is not an unalterable state of affairs that just fell on us from the sky. Because guess what happens when a whole society still somehow, in this year of our lord 2021, thinks that children by default belong to their mothers? Those mothers are paid less, fall into the mommy career trap, are taken less seriously, and are supposed to have one foot out of the door and one eye in the kitchen throughout their working lives.
Which in turn makes it more likely that even a couple who really want to share paternity leave or are trying to find a solution for childcare, be it long-term or for the “Good grief, one of the children is sick, how are we going to juggle this today? “The emergency that has become so common during the pandemic, will choose her and not him to suffer the blow and failure of the job. It is not because have to be that way or it was meant to be or even because the individual families involved want it to be that way; it is because that is the system we have built.
These provincial and territorial agreements, which are supposed to be added to a national plan for the care of children, could be nothing less than transformative and generational in their impact on the social fabric of this country and on the children and families that will benefit. There are many “ifs” attached to that hypothetical superlative: if the resulting daycare spaces are plentiful and of high quality, if everything survives elections and changes in government, if this significantly changes the decisions families can make about caring for children. children and the rest of their lives as a result, if it is financially viable, but the impact could be enormous.
But if part of that project is about building greater equality within families and in society at large, and it should be, then we should speak more ambitiously and honestly about who is supposed to benefit from this: to all of us.
Reference-www.macleans.ca