Amanda Quance
I have a dirty secret to tell you. It’s a lie that has been told over and over and so often that I sometimes thought it was true. Child care is not a labour of love. It is work. It is paid labour and really quite terrible pay at that!
I learned recently that the lowest return on a post-secondary education in Canada is to invest in training as an early childhood educator. When you train as a social worker, an animator, a lawyer or a pastry chef, you will earn much more. In the field of early childhood education (ECE), your investment is not worth it.
The irony, of course, is that when governments invest in child care the return is remarkably high, and a universal, publicly funded system would “pay for itself” (Stanford, 2020). The Conference Board of Canada published findings in 2017 that showed every dollar spent on early childhood education pays back six dollars.
Training as an ECE requires that you learn about child development, program planning, health and safety, working with families and building relationships with children. Over and over again, research shows that high-quality child care is linked to the training and qualifications of staff. So, it is worthwhile for children, families, and society, in general, that there be investment in post-secondary education for early childhood education.
Not long ago the federal government announced $420 million in grants and bursaries to help provinces and territories train and retain qualified early childhood educators. Yet there is a tug of war going on with parents paying unaffordable high fees and the EC educators taking home wages so low that the profession is unattractive. The only way to end this is to publicly fund child care directly and make early childhood education a desirable profession by funding educators’ wages so we can make a decent living.
There are several reasons why EC educators have such low wages. There’s the undervaluing of women’s work which has traditionally been unpaid when done in the home by mothers. There’s the fragmented approach to what little government funding exists, and this results in a divided sector. And there’s the low rate of unionization. We have seen child care as a market product and not as a public service. We have relied on child care workers to provide the public service for next to nothing in wages.
There’s an obvious and easy solution: provide public funding for a universal, regulated and high-quality system. There are lots of people who love working with children and we are ready to invest in giving this care.
Is the federal government ready?
Amanda Quance is a member of Child Care Now-Ottawa: ottawa.ccnow.ca/