Déjà vu: Childcare
We don’t need a royal commission to know that this quality rights based care costs.
This week the very same ABC program that prompted a royal commission into Australia’s aged care sector with Anne Colony’s ‘Who Cares’ two-part investigation, focussed six months of its resources to uncover chronic failures in Australia’s childcare sector.
With parent and employee whistleblowers, freedom of information requests, and reluctant transparency from state regulatory bodies, Four Corners revealed extensive rates of (serious) child abuse, neglect, as well as unsurprisingly, site and staff mismanagement.
Without having seen the program, I already felt my stomach sink.
Credit: ABC Four Corners.
Parents? Hm, women, too often hold the unrealistic social pressures and internalised emotional guilt for outsourcing mothering. Heaven forbid, having their own professional and recreational needs. They already feel angst about their family’s choices around childcare.
To put it quickly, and poorly no doubt - because this in itself is a complex and multifaceted issue, we know all too well the face of a small child with their arms extended and tears forming at the school gate.
What we don’t know as well are the tears of the parent. I recall the face of a straight haired well-dressed lass dropping her wee youngster as she returned to work for the first time, in tension she asked: “Should it be this hard?”
I’ve had the texts from close friends expressing angst with a “clingy child”, and I too have cried in my car after leaving the babe in tears - wanting to get to work, wanting to have my own identity, and too, wanting for my child to feel safe and ready to rock ‘n roll.
Hoping that the centre that was both close and had availability (lol you wish) was in fact the centre I hoped it was.
My heart again sank for the early childhood educators and workers (97% of whom are women), who face heavy burnout, are paid as low as $24 an hour, and more often than not, challenging and poor conditions. But most painfully, low professional acknowledgement and respect. Dear god, pay them more.
“Thank you!” You hear from parents as they pickup and run - struggling to get through the traffic and avoid the tantrum, or worst yet - nap, on the way home. “I could never do what you do!” I over adulate, conflicted by how long and stressful the day looks.
Neither of these people deserve yet another reason to feel guilty or ashamed for the sector that they either work in or rely on for care. “Most important job in the world,” runs through my head with a taint of bitterness.
So I breathe in, watch the program. What I learn? It’s state based regulation with federal funding, reports of mismanagement increasing, and yes, the privatised funding model not only allows for childcare deserts in regional areas, but low oversight of the billions the government invests in childcare subsidy each year to care for vulnerable community members, in this case children.
The federal Greens call for a royal commission. How are these revelations new? How have we not learnt our lessons from the aged care sector and its systemic funding and workforce failures some five years prior?
Please. We don’t need a royal commission with thousands of submissions and dozens of public hearings to know that patriarchy is alive and well, and to draw the very likely parallels in how our government and institutions treat care work in this country. Aka women’s work. Easy. Boring. Low-value work.
And in this case, in extension to that, how we treat young children. As neuroscience develops so too does our understanding of the neural pathways that can take decades to unlearn.
I can’t help but think annoyed and frustrated, how hard can it be to expect the oppressive institution of motherhood and women’s labour to yet again extend to underpaying, under-training and overextending. Conditions that most impact marginalised women and children as young as six weeks.
We don’t need a royal commission, simply take the 148 recommendations from the aged care reports and pay what it costs. Sorry, did our government flinch? Because this stuff costs. Quality rights based care, COSTS.
Oppressive institution of motherhood, systemic devalued care labour, and an under-estimation of the impact of early childhood development. You shouldn’t need six months of investigative journalism to tell you that childcare in Australia is broken.
Rather than a ‘betrayal of trust’ as per the program’s title, I would prefer ‘too costly to handle’, ‘shocking but not shocked.’
Okay, it’s a working title.
Emma 💋