State run childcare facilities fail the child and the family

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa

A researcher and author from the United Kingdom says state-run experiments in rearing children have failed.

Patricia Morgan, author of Back to Utopia: The Pursuit of the Child Care Paradise, says universal daycare programs have proved to be prohibitively expensive and many countries are abandoning them.

Morgan said Sweden tried to "engineer equal outcomes" for men and women, so women could be "free of their children" to pursue careers, Morgan said. The tax system virtually forced women into the workforce.

Swedish failure

But Sweden has found the program "unimaginably expensive."

In addition, daycares don't work well for children under 18 months. "Human beings don't have litters," she said, noting that care of children "doesn't work like a production line."

Morgan spoke at the Sept. 27 conference on marriage sponsored by the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC). Sweden, she said, has higher rates of attempted suicide among youth, higher levels of mental problems; and higher rates of abortion among teens than it did 20 years ago.

Studies show a correlation between attendance in institutional daycare and increased aggression. "The worst thing for other children is other children," Morgan said, noting they pick up their peers' bad behaviours.

Sweden has had to cut back. The country now offers mothers lengthy paid maternity leaves. If a woman has a baby a year, she can effectively stay home for five to six years on nearly full-time wages.

Norway and Finland have moved towards voucher systems, allowing women to buy the kind of care they prefer, or opting to stay at home, she said.

Morgan noted that countries that have tried the institutional daycare model have seen a collapsing birthrate because of the difficulties of contending with taking children of different ages to daycare, and to school, while working full time.

Family of choice

But despite these failures, progressive theories that reject biological relatedness are still advancing public policy. The trend is towards "families of choice" that she described as "diverse, fluid and unresolved, constantly chosen and re-chosen."

She warned the eradication of marriage "goes hand in hand with campaigns on behalf of children's rights," where the child can effectively choose his or her family. She noted how Canada has replaced biological parenthood with a legal construct with the introduction of same-sex marriage.

Totalitarian choice

State-run childcare facilities are the "preferred model of the totalitarian state," she said, noting that in the former East Germany children were in daycare 10 hours a day. "Children hardly went home."

Morgan said the state has been complicit in family disintegration and the rise of what she called "feral reproduction," or multi-partnered fertility, where children are "deprived of the security" of being raised by their own mother and father. Children need committed parents who will "go to unreasonable lengths for their sake."

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