Why the fuck in NZ isn’t Early Child Care nationalised and paid for every child over 2 until they are 5?
Why isn’t there a universal free system in place to allow your mothers to either just have some time off from being mum or using that time to work?
Why do we charge them money for child care?
It is outrageous that we don’t have a free universal 2 years – 5 years early child care system in this country.
The ‘free’ 20 hours come with so many fish hooks and it’s made so difficult for working mothers to juggle.
The whole system should be free and run by the State the same way we run schools while private providers can provide a more expensive version for the yoga mommy bloggers who want the boughi gender neutral vegan version.
The reason why child care is so expensive is because once again our lightly regulated bullshit provisions of public services has been over run by corporate interests, 62% of our industry is run by private companies and vulture capital funds!
This is another under regulated industry that the Government have done nothing about!
I’m not looking for Socialism from Labour, just basic regulated capitalism!
Spend resource on free early child centres run by the state so that mothers can have the agency to get paid more or to just rest!
While we are at it, let’s increase full paid paternal leave to 12 months (for a total of 2 children) so that mums or dadas can stay with their infant for the first year of that infants life.
Let’s build these systems of support in for parents and their children with an early education state infrastructure as our policy response to the gender pay gap. By fully funding the infrastructure of motherhood, you give those women the opportunity to have the agency to work without the huge cost of childcare.
We live in a progressive liberal democracy, and one of the joys of living in a liberal progressive democracy is that as citizens we all share in the harvest of civil society.
It doesn’t matter if you are a Garbageman, a road worker, a Dr, a Dentist, a Lawyer, Teacher, Plumber, Nurse, supermarket check out, retail worker, etc etc etc – if you don’t do the job you do, the complex system of a liberal progressive democracy collapses.
If all garbagemen stop, you get sick within a month. If all the dentists or Drs stopped people would die, if all the road workers stopped the roads would be impassable within a year!
No matter how high or low your role, if they all stopped the system would collapse – we all participate to keep this liberal progressive democracy operating, and we all deserve to reap the harvest of that societal stability and that harvest is free child care, parental leave, public holidays, free health, free education.
We should rejoice in the capacity of our system to be able to support the modernity of life and strengthen our families, not allow petty user pays bigotry to turn on our village.
We fund these things to make life easier for our citizens, not more difficult!
To allow the spite of envy to rob working parents of the ability to work by having child care paid for is malicious and we should be better than that.
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Definitely there should be more money and easier access for quality Early Childhood Education (not childcare). But as an ECE educator, I would like to point out that most pre-school children are not ready to spend more than about 20 hours away from their family per week. In my opinion, children under three years old are not in a good position to learn well in an ECE without a parent (or other very trusted adult) present, because people do not learn much when they are traumatized. Often they are not ready until they are about five.
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