Daycare is bad: Kate Tennier

Today's Grope and Flail features an Op-ed by Kate Tennier, founder of Advocates for Child Care Choice arguing... daycare is bad.

It's odd piece. One would think by the name of her organisation that they favoured providing parents some sort of choice in child care.

However, that does not appear to be the case, she states:

"The truth is that affordable, high-quality, universal daycare is bad for kids, and bad for the economy."

Tennier contends, in a nutshell (and I do mean a NUTSHELL), that the less time parents spend with their children, the more likely children are to develop behavioural problems.

If the state subsidizes daycare, it reduces cost, thereby encouraging parents to work rather than raise their own children.

She's got a point. Ignore your kids and they will likely wind up being naughty.

But Tennier's argument is not an argument for choice, it is an argument to end daycare, to ensure that parents stay at home.

I'd like to agree.

Like most parents, I would rather hang out with my kids, perhaps home-school them, and as a result, I can't work. Given that my wife's absence may also be detrimental to their future, she also will be unable to work. Sign me up.

Tennier worries that her "movement" has been portrayed as "...rich whiners unwilling to extend the benefits of state daycare to the little people..."

Perhaps.

Ms. Tennier does seem to have that curious conservative fixation with "state" daycare, while silent on the private daycare providers, as if the two systems are employing genetically different daycare workers.

And Ms. Tennier's support of the Tory send-your-own-money-back-to-you-scheme, certainly would indicate that, but it appears she is more of a stay-at-home parent advocate.

Which is fine. If you've got that choice.

But if you can't afford daycare, then you don't have that choice.

And for a single parent family making $30K a year, $60.70 after taxes per month of your own money sent back to you by a bureaucrat isn't about childcare.

It's about subsidizing a tax-collector, not a daycare provider.

It's about an ideology, not a practical reality.

And that's the problem.