Expansion of free childcare

[Firefly2023]

I am too old to benefit from this but I do wonder if we are heading in the wrong direction. The expansion of free childcare to one and two year olds is obviously to encourage more people back to work. Is this really such a good thing for the children?

I know that women want to continue their careers and staying at home is detrimental to that. Also in current economic climate, two wages are necessary to survive in most households now, but I am concerned. I think it is a shame that children are all bundled into childcare at a young age and feel sorry for parents being pushed into work when they may prefer to stay home.

I always felt that I missed so much by going back to work very early and I regret not taking more time off in those early years. I wonder if there is a better way. Maybe parents should be encouraged to look after their own children if they want to rather than handing over their babies to childcare. Maybe spend some of the money on incentivising employers to give more paid leave/shorter working hours to support SAH parents. AIBU?

I think this is great for parents, however my concern is how nurseries are going to cope. They receive most of their money from private payments of the under 3's as the money they receive for funded children is very little and so they're going to lose out on a lot of money. If they change the ratios too this will put even further strain on the staff and unfortunately recruitment for nurseries is at a massive low at the moment

30 hours free isn't actually 30 hours a week though. I have my son in nursery full time and have the 30 hours and it still costs me nearly a grand a month.

I think lots of people missed the 4 billion £ pledge that came along with this 'announcement' and potentially higher salaries for nursery staff so it does seem they have considered the shortfall in funding. Who knows yet.

If it really costs 15k to send a child to nursery you can't tell me that people "can't afford" to stay home. They just don't want to.

Yes, I don't want to. But even if I did, we really couldn't afford it. If I quit work we'd be £800 a month worse off, even with the childcare savings. We can't afford that.

@JenniferBarkley This is a good summary of the evidence; criticalscience.medium.com/on-the-science-of-daycare-4d1ab4c2efb4

Warning: if you have no choice but to use nursery/daycare for your very young children then it would be better to give this one a miss. It won't make you feel good and if it's not something you have a free choice about then it's not worth it.

I'm very much pro-choice when it comes to this. Fully support any parent who feels childcare is the right choice for their family, but plenty of parents who don't want to find themselves in the position of having no choice, and direct payments to families would help everyone.

As Sue Cowley shared on Twitter this morning…

Whatever Hunt announces about funding he can't magic up additional spaces because (a) many settings are already full (b) many settings have already closed and (c) there are no staff left for us to employ

People who would prefer to stay at home still can....surely with preferences and choices it means its because you can afford it. No one is stopping that.

I have twins. Cost with a childminder is approx £2k a month but if they were in nursery it would be closer to £3.5k a month

I'm a single parent - not through choice

I support extending funded hours BUT

• they must address what the funding is - for nurseries the hourly funded rate is less than what they charge parents so they make a loss on each place

• they must address access to funded places - I think todays news will be a giant white elephant. Just because the government extends it there is no law that says childcare providers have to offer those places.

• costs for babies under a year old will become hugely expensive to offset the cost of giving funded places from age 1 onwards

If they don't raise hourly pay for staff then this all won't go ahead.
As there will be no staff. Not sure why everyone is so excited. This can only go ahead if the provision and (qualified) staffing is there and for many nurseries around the UK, this is not the case.

My reading of that blog post is that it depends on the child’s age, time spent in ‘daycare’ (ie the underlying evidence is from the US, so not necessarily relevant - the US has no entitlement to paid parental leave, for instance), quality of care and socioeconomic status.

In Scandinavian countries and in Germany childcare is heavily subsided, there’s high take-up, and there’s high female participation in the workforce. And they have far better childhood outcomes than we do in the UK. But there’s lengthy paid parental leave for both parents.

Research is contradictory, too - it clearly indicates the benefits of having two involved, hands-on parents, rather than a close bond with one parent and a superficial relationship with the other. Which of course is far more likely to be the case in a family with a SAHP. This is actually my main reason for working, although I have many - I deliberately married a man who would make a great father, so I want us to share the burden of wage earning and the joy of parenting equally. He’s more to us than a provider of sperm and money.

This really can’t be reduced to ‘SAHP - good, childcare - bad.’

@IAmTheWalrus85 age does indeed seem to be the main factor, and as the entitlement for nursery is being extended to younger children this is of relevance to this policy. The underlying evidence is from around the world if you look at the sources, the author of the evidence summary is American so uses the term Daycare, but many of the sources are from Canada/Scandinavia/UK/Australasia etc and the findings are broadly consistent across the board.

You are certainly right that there are plenty of other non-childcare factors that influence child outcomes, and parents almost certainly matter more than nursery. I think it's just good to have the whole picture so that parents can make balanced and informed decisions.

We don't have the qualified and experienced staff available to implement this and I also agree that many nurseries are not suitable.
My worry is that the qualification will be 'dumbed down' so it becomes the case that just anyone can do the job. In the current nursery I work in there is 1 level 3 in each of the 3 rooms. If anyone of them leaves, they have major problems.
I think some people despite hearing it on the news are completely unaware of how bad the staffing situation is.

I'm a SAHP and I assure you my DH is much more than a "provider of sperm and money", and my DC have as close a relationship with him as they do with me.

I'll read it properly later if I get a chance @pbdr, a lot on this week. I admit the intro doesn't fill me with confidence - seems to disparage the idea of academic research but then say that the article is going to be based on the literature. Don't quite follow. I did note that it said

For children from “middle class and affluent families”, that much time in daycare has about two-thirds the negative effect on behavior of having “a moderately depressed mother”.

There's a lot tied up in one sentence alone , not least the misogyny of the assumption that a primary care giver must be a mother, but it certainly underlines my own decisions

All of these discussions are pointless, really. To pretend that childcare is anything other than necessary is completely disingenuous - single parents need to work, families on a low income need two salaries to make ends meet, some women actually want to maintain their career. To the children, the reasons they find themselves in a nursery is irrelevant. So let's make nurseries palaces, let's fund them to the hilt so that every child can have every advantage going - including stable care from people who are properly paid to do their job. If you pay nursery staff what they deserve, that would instantly improve nurseries.

Yeah, well, that's a whole other conversation about capitalism and its effects on the family, isn't it, if your main argument against SAHPs being supported to stay at home with their children is that it wouldn't benefit the economy. Do you also feel that way about a universal basic income?

I'm not a communist or even a socialist particularly, I don't know what system of government is best. But I do know that, broadly speaking, governmental obsession with the economy, and growth, and making money is not of benefit to family life.

This was our experience too, the same women looking after each of our DC two years apart.

My favourite staff, especially in the baby rooms, have often not been the women with the higher qualifications (although some of those are excellent too and one in particular has become like an extended family member), but the grannies. The older women have so much more perspective, nothing fazes them. From what I gather, the owner is a good employer which presumably makes all the difference, the vast majority of the staff seem very happy there despite the difficult work and crap pay.

Obviously we need to wait for details but I think that money includes money for councils to provide wraparound care in schools as well. I think. So it may not be all just for the nurseries and the free hours

I don't see why the government would pay people to not work if they could instead pay people to work.

Many nurseries have unqualified staff who do not want to be there. High staff turnover and rely heavily on agency.
Very fortunate indeed if you have found a nursery with consistent staff. I've been in over 10 nurseries and consider this to be unusual.
Nurseries certainly aren't right for every child. Especially the under 2's. We don't have the qualified, experienced and passionate staff that is needed. With the pay and the long hours as well as the work conditions this isn't really a surprise.

@JenniferBarkley I think you might have misunderstood the intro. She is criticising the appeals to authority that parenting books and sites often use, not disparaging science. Indeed she's clear that the underlying evidence is what matters and so links thoroughly to the sources throughout to show that her claims are fully substantiated.

The author has discussed the issue of how gendered the findings are on other platforms. The results focus largely on maternal employment and other maternal factors because the studies/evidence overwhelmingly measure these rather than paternal factors. So equivalent evidence for men simply doesn't exist, it has not been studied to anywhere near the same extent. Certainly misogyny is going to be the underlying problem here, but not on the part of the author herself.

It’s still not a good idea. It doesn’t stack up. How would you fund it from taxes if people choose not to work?

? We couldn’t afford for me to stay home with the DC. My DH was a PT Uni student and a SAHD. I was on around £70k/Yr. If I had stayed home, how would the mortgage get paid? How would we even eat? You are not even considering other family set ups.

My DC were in childcare most days a week when my DH was in class or doing his unpaid internship hours- which were all during the working day. They didn’t have online or evening classes for mature students back then. And back then it wasn’t subsidised at all, so was just as expensive. Besides it’s a no brainier….£70k minus £15k is still an income of £55k/Yr…but staying home would have meant an income of £0k a year!!

You can’t survive on that and I wasn’t going to go and fraudulently be a benefits mum when I had a decent job and could support myself and my family.

So you are 100% completely wrong to dismiss the fact that many women truly cannot afford to stay home with the children.

You are off your rocker. Staying home would have meant £0 income. ZERO. Actually negative income as my DH was taking on student debt.

In what way could I have “chosen” to be a SAHM? My DH and I had dragged ourselves out of homelessness and poverty. I had a finally secured a decent career. My DH had worked to support me through Uni and now it was my turn to support him.

How is it a “choice” to realise you can’t stay home without flushing your life down the toilet along with your children’s life chances? I really don’t like your tone saying that those of us who returned to work quickly had different values or priorities as implying that we put our children at a lower priority than you did. You don’t even recognise the privilege you had to even have a choice.

All the comments saying “it’s a tricky one” or “it’s hard to know” are beyond ignorant (as is the OP).

How on earth is funding something that parents are currently having to pay for supposedly forcing those who don’t want to use it to use it?! Just because something is free doesn’t mean you have to use it. We fund abortions on the NHS, it doesn’t mean that anyone who doesn’t want one has to have one - or is even encouraged to. We fund autism assessments, but it doesn’t mean every parent has every child assessed. We fund libraries, no parent is forced to take their child to a library. Even if you insist on being judgemental and pious (incorrectly) assuming that children of SAHP’s have better outcomes or are happier, your premise for this outrage is lacking in logic at best.

It’s not “difficult”, it’s not “tricky”, it’s not “hard”. Expanding childcare funding is a good thing. You don’t have to use it if you choose not to. You don’t gain anything from other people struggling.

@WigglyWigglyWiggly as one of the "ignorant" posters who described the situation as "tricky", if you were to read my full post you would see that I was proposing direct cash payments to parents in lieu of direct nursery funding to provide support to both families who want to use childcare, and families who want to keep their children at home in the early years. I am fully on board with taxpayer funded substantial financial support towards childcare, but not everyone feels that direct funding of nursery places is the best and only way of delivering that.