I spent four years trying to fix the child care crisis, and failed. I know exactly why.
Money!
The economy isn’t rigged up to pay for early years care.
On average, less than 1% of GDP globally is spent on early childcare and education, according to the latest OECD figures. In some countries, such as the US, Portugal, Ireland, Costa Rica, Cyprus and Turkey, it is as low as 0.3%. In the UK, it is 0.5%. Spending is highest in Iceland (1.7%), followed by Sweden (1.6%), Norway (1.4%), France (1.3%), Denmark (1.2%) and Finland (1.2%).
Child care as a feminist issue
This is absolutely a feminist issue. Women’s time as unpaid carers has been dramatically undervalued in our system for centuries. The balance may be better in some countries today, but it is still women who are most often forced to give up work to look after young children.
Child care as a labour market issue
Theirworld’s Early Years report, published in April 2023, quotes the World Bank (2021) in saying: “Expanding the childcare economy offers substantial employment opportunities: the expansion of the childcare workforce to meet current needs could create 43 million jobs globally.” My child care social enterprise in Lebanon, Jaleesa, created 100 of those jobs, between 2016 and 2020. It was a drop in the ocean, but I promise you, it was hard-won.
The innovation in Jaleesa was to place value on child care as a key part of early childhood development, as well as a lever to help parents (especially mothers) stay in the workplace. It was so exciting that for every job we created for a child carer, more parents had access to continue their own careers. We devised an early child development training course, as well as digital literacy and other training for our child carers, and we built technology platforms to give this workforce access to the market. Our child care was really top.
Sadly, we closed Jaleesa in 2020 due to the combined crises of the Lebanese economic crash and the coronavirus pandemic. It wasn’t possible for us to continue. But the main one is that paying for quality child care is really expensive for families.
Child care as a global household finance issue
As a child care social entrepreneur I interviewed hundreds of parents. I’m also a parent of two under-fives, and since becoming a mum I have lived in Lebanon, the UK, and the Netherlands. I also work with Theirworld, a global children’s charity, which supports community-led early childhood education projects. This has given me an insight into the early years challenges in at least 15 countries.
We’ve been customers of
- Nannies
- Daycares
- A childminder
- Casual babysitters (sooooo many casual babysitters!)
- Grandparents
- After school care (in the Netherlands, this is “BSO”)
We have spent thousands of euros on the early years care of our two kids. We feel privileged to be able to do that, and grateful that some of our Dutch tax euros come back to us as child care subsidy. But a survey commissioned by Theirworld, and conducted by Hall + Partners, found that most parents find it difficult to meet childcare costs: 52% in India, 57% in the Netherlands, 60% in Nigeria, 68% in the US and Brazil, and 72% in Turkey and 74% in the UK.
The survey talked to more than 7,000 parents and carers in the UK, US, Nigeria, Brazil, Turkey, India and the Netherlands. (The countries were chosen to represent geographically and economically diverse regions.)
These findings reveal that I (and maybe you?) are not alone.
A global early years crisis
We are in the midst of a global early years crisis in which children are being deprived of education and care in their most formative years due to the spiralling cost of nursery and preschool fees. A third of parents in India (33%) who use childcare say they have been forced to quit their job or drop out of higher education to avoid paying childcare fees. In the US, the figure stands at 27%, in the UK 23%, in the Netherlands 22%, in Brazil 17%, in Turkey 16% and in Nigeria 13%.
This tracks – I absolutely love work but in the past I’ve seriously considered stopping or reducing it, to stem the outflow of cash on child care. (Elvira, a lecturer in design, puts it eloquently in this article.)
It’s an issue of agency
“Young children are the world’s greatest persuaders. But they don’t have a voice at the table to ask for urgent change.” – Act for Early Years report
What would my pre-schoolers ask for? If I’m honest, they would ask for more time with their mummy and daddy. But they’d also ask for more playtime, more books, more new experiences – and I know child care provides them with that.
What can we do about it?
There’s a lot more to say about this topic, especially the other side of the coin: children’s education and development, and also on teacher training and how early childhood education is valued as a profession.
Advocacy and civil society do make a difference. 12,000 women campaigned in central London last year at the March of the Mummies and Pregnant then Screwed and others have placed child care on the UK political agenda. Theirworld’s report also highlights an example in Turkiye: “a robust civil society advocacy movement launched a national campaign that raised public awareness about the importance of early childhood education and persuaded the government to make preschool mandatory. As a result, preschool enrolment more than trebled from 19% in 2005 to 67% in 2012 (Results for Development, 2015).”
For now, you can join me and many others in signing Theirworld’s Open Letter to ask G20 leaders to guarantee:
- Universal access to affordable, quality childcare, with high quality, proven interventions available to every child spanning education, health, nutrition and social protection
- Investment in a fully trained, qualified and funded early years workforce
- Delivery of the internationally agreed target to invest 10% of education funding in pre-primary education and learning, and agree similar targets across all sectors
My social enterprise may not have fixed the child care system. But neither has anyone else – yet. We need to all start demanding change, and we might finally see it happen.
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I’d also love to connect on LinkedIn for a chat.
Onward!
