Right in the centre - Pardon the re-run
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- Published on Thursday, January 25, 2018
Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner & Press
Television viewers are quite used to re-runs. Newspaper readers not so much. This week, I am offering up a re-run of a 2017 column. This week, we have had so many staff off work due to illness that we are operating on a very stretched schedule. Hopefully, next week will be back to normal, whatever normal is in our newspaper world. I recently read a column about the universal day care myth. Day care has been a huge topic for many years and there are those who would have us believe that all children should be in day care. All day care should be owned by the government and certainly all levels of day care should be supervised and regulated by the government.
That of course is untrue but it doesn’t stop some folks from pushing the idea that we must have universal day care. Day care is a highly valuable institution in a community. Some folks truly benefit from having a day care option. What I have always found very frustrating, annoying even, is that many people do not seriously evaluate the pros and cons of day care. There is a cost to day care that seriously erodes the financial viability of believing that every parent must be working outside the home.
A single parent has to have some day care options but it may not be a government run day care. Two parent families may also want or need day care for their kids and if it makes economic or career advancement sense, that’s all well and good. The only thing I ask people to consider is the affordability of day care for a family income.
Other aspects of day care are harder to measure but they should be considered. If a child loves being at day care and is doing well, that’s fantastic. But if a child isn’t doing well at day care, it can have some long term detrimental results.
The part that I object to is that governments, bureaucrats, academics and union leaders tend to want to put every kid in a government run, unionized, subsidized day care. The unions love growth in publicly funded operations at any level as it automatically swells union numbers. Union leaders are some of our best entrepreneurs as they want to grow their influence and their numbers. The easiest way to do it is to swell the number of people in public service unions.
I admire people who are truly innovative in the way they care for their kids. Sometimes it’s sharing child care between families or between generations. Sometimes it is juggling shifts so one parent can be always at home. I have no problem if a single parent needs day care. What I object to is our society being told that we have to have day care, that it has to be government run, has to be government funded and that parents can’t raise their own kids, they have to be raised by the state.
Having the government involved in every aspect of our life from day care to regulating how much sugar we eat is getting rather annoying. If I am really good, maybe my grand daughter will let me read a book to my great grandsons while we enjoy a candy bar without the government looking over our shoulders.
