Your view: children should be the focus

Our recent series evoked a strong response, with parents seeking more State funding and greater flexibility from employers. The following is a selection of your opinions

Sky is the limit

I return to work as a hospital doctor next January after six months' maternity leave. I found a suitable though unqualified person to mind my new baby in our home, by advertising locally. Our offer of €450 per four-and-a-half-day week was rejected. It seems the sky is really the limit. It is tempting to stay at home with my baby, a waste of 15 years' training. I am in favour of a national register of childminders, with financial reward based on qualifications, not merely availability. My husband, also a doctor with hard-earned overtime, is keen to meet the ransom.

Kate Fitzgerald, Drumcondra, Dublin

Formative learning years

Early childhood education in Ireland is still seen as the underdog to all other levels of education. Whereas primary and secondary level schooling are State-funded, pre-schools fight for funding from Europe, the HSE and and other sources. In the coming Budget, the Government should recognise that pre-school education is about a child's formative learning. It is about offering a child qualified staff in quality services where they can develop and reach their full potential and gain a great first step in the education ladder. By putting additional funding directly into pre-school services we can offer high quality childcare at affordable prices to parents.

Kelda Barnes, Darndale Belcamp Integrated Childcare Service, Dublin

Parents should have choice

As a stay-at-home mother of seven children under 12, I think that parents should have the choice about who cares for their children and no one should be penalised for the choice they make. The Government should reintroduce tax credits for all dependant children regardless of who looks after them, and then increase child benefits for those parents not in the tax net or out of work. I sincerely hope this Government does not discriminate between parents who work outside the home and those who look after their own children, as they are already doing with individualisation. They will lose my vote for certain!

Mary Egan, Blackrock, Co Dublin

Employers can help

The current debate focuses much on the provision and funding of childcare while ignoring the role that employers can play in helping employees to reconcile family and parental responsibilities through the provision of flexible working hours, working from home options etc. Ibec should be actively canvassing its membership base to provide such options to its employees, otherwise the Government should provide parents with the right to request flexibility, similar to the legislation that exists in the UK.

Sandra, Stillorgan, Co Dublin

The middle ground

Definitely have equal funds given to middle- and low-income families in the next budget . . . why are middle-income families always discriminated against because they worked hard to get a good job? By the time mortgage and decent childcare expenses are paid out, it is practically the same for us as being on a very low income.

Sinead O'Riordan, Cork

No choice but to work

I am a working mum and the main earner in our family, with a three-and-a-half-year-old little girl in full-time creche since she was three months old. I had no choice as I got only six weeks' paid maternity leave in my company. There is no obligation for the employer to make up the difference between State maternity benefit payment and salary. How can you make ends meet with a maternity benefit of €250 per week? It's a joke.

I am expecting our second child, and unfortunately I will have to go back to work probably after six weeks, as I will not be able to afford the mortgage and the cost of the creche of one child (€770) on maternity benefit alone. I don't know how we are going to cope with the arrival of our second child, as the creche costs will increase to €1,540 per month.

In my opinion, the voucher idea is a very good one. The company I work for has launched that scheme in the UK and it is a great benefit to the staff. I agree that it should not be a direct payment to parents, as you want to ensure that it is spent for the child, and help to get the right childcare centre, which is controlled and resourced properly, with people properly trained.

Regarding the suggestion that mothers should get a year's parental leave, if you are a mum supporting a family, there is no way you could live for a year on €250 per week benefit and survive. I think that the real issue is that women have to work and earn good money to afford living in Dublin. And childcare is paramount for the mental balance of a family, because if you are worried constantly about money, you are not available to play with your children and be happy.

Celine Cazali, Dublin

Flexibility is key

The key for providing the best care for children is flexibility for working parents and the chance for subsidised playschool for all pre-schoolers. In particular, I think the Government should bring in laws mandating that employers offer flexible or part-time working hours to parents of young children. My personal experience of requesting part-time work/flexible working hours was very negative, and I left a very good career as a result. It should not be up to stressed working parents to have to try and change employers' old-fashioned attitudes.

Róisín Russell, Ballina, Co Tipperary

Not a loving environment

I have an 18-month-old son and I currently mind him full time at home because my experience of childcare in Dublin left me cold. When my son was six months old, we placed him in an expensive, reputable creche that we believed would provide the best possible care, but the care our son received was, in our opinion, below standard. He was fed and changed and put down for naps, but the loving, caring environment that we had expected just didn't exist. Staff-to-baby ratios were frequently below the required standard.

I often had to pop him on the floor when we arrived in the morning because the one girl in the baby room had three little babies in front of her, spoon-feeding them all at the same time. We only had him in the creche for six months, but the staff turnover was unacceptably high for such young babies. The girls themselves were mostly lovely, but very young, and some didn't have childcare qualifications.

They regularly lost his bottles, regularly sent him home in another baby's clothes, and his routine was changed to fit in with the creche. This was the kind of care that I felt as parents we were expected to just accept as normal or even "good" quality. Whenever we raised these issues with the creche we were met with defensiveness and excuses. How are parents expected to find quality childcare for their children if this is the level of care offered in professional, "regulated" creches?

I believe that the emphasis in the Budget should be on the children's needs - not just on how to reduce the cost of childcare for working parents, because this achieves nothing toward improving the quality of care provided to the children.

I believe that babies should be minded in the home by a parent for their first year of life and this should be paid for by the Government. We need extended paid maternity leave, proper paid paternity leave and extended parental leave. Thereafter, proper regulated childcare facilities and childminders need to be invested in.

All children should be given a free place in a quality pre-school the year before they start school. I fully acknowledge that childcare cost is a huge issue, but the emphasis needs to be on the quality of childcare offered to babies and children up to school age, not purely on reduced costs for parents.

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Children like farmed chickens

I want two years' paid leave for the mother or father to stay at home and give the best start to life, because children need their parents. I want free pre-school for children aged two to five years. I want the Government to stop wasting money on massive expensive creches where children are like artificially farmed chickens. I want the Government to fully support and fund community-based playgroups and pre-schools, which are badly in need of financial help.

Monica Forrestal Stafford, Wexford

Parents are best

The Government should assist parents who wish to mind their own children. No matter how many surveys are done, it is quite obvious that the best people to rear children are their parents. Despite this, the Government introduced individualisation of the tax system, resulting in it being more beneficial, financially, for both parents to work. Please put the emphasis on helping parents look after their children, not on ensuring that they have as little time with them as possible.

Mary Stewart, Donegal

The vital first year

A couple should do all they can, including sacrificing all luxuries, second car, mobile phone and holidays, to be with the child at least the first year. It is proven to be extremely important for their emotional development as the child views the world through the portal of the security from the parents.

Any bank should be obliged to postpone mortgage payments to enable this - after all, they still get their money whether it is a 25-year or 26-year period.

Creches should not be allowed to take children under the age of one. The Government should do all they can to support this and not be focused on getting both parents back into the workforce as soon as possible.

I have two small kids myself and a third one coming, and looking after your children should be looked on as positive and enriching!

Jorinde Rolsma, Dublin 8

The most important work

It would appear that the whole role of nurturing our children is being sacrificed to feed this forever-hungry Celtic tiger. We have lost sight of the fact that as mothers and fathers we do the most important, noble work there is: we shape society from how we nurture our kids. From my experience as a mother and community development worker, no one can care for our children as we can. For creche workers, their work, for the most part, is a low-paid job where a lot of them would rather not be - and is this what we call quality childcare.

Will these creche children of today and tomorrow resent the parents who put them into creches for long hours, for the sake of the economy? Quality childcare is a very real need for parents, but it surely has to have as its guiding principle the greater good of the child and hence society. As a mother who raised her own kids, when I look at the creches around me, they are not places I would place my kids in for long hours.

Monica Uí Sionnain, Dublin 15

Not for politicians to decide

Only in August I moved from Belgium to Ireland with my three children, aged three, five and seven, and even though I knew childcare was not as well organised as in Belgium, the contrast could not have been bigger. Firstly, the discussion about what is best for children - parents at home or not - should not be a political discussion. It is not for politicians to decide which type of childcare is best, but to make sure that parents have the alternatives that they think are best. All the research into the implications of different childcare options should be part of the final parental decision on childcare, but it should be kept out of the political arena.

The lack of any outside control and regulation (in practice anyway) is the most important issue for politicians to tackle. By funding directly to the childcare organisers, qualitative measures can be put in place to obtain this funding.

Thirdly, after-school care seems to have an easy, straight-forward, inexpensive solution. Buildings are free once school is finished; only extra insurance stops their use. Most schools can make a room available in which games, a table and some chairs can be kept and used as a location for after-school care, so it does not have to interfere with the class rooms.

Children can be dropped off every morning before school and be kept every afternoon in a secure place with other children they know. The school teachers will not be given more work, as after-school care would be provided by personnel from outside school. It will be cheaper, more reliable and can be regulated and controlled.

Akke MacLochlainn, Galway

Different values

Mothers working outside the home have developed a very strong lobby and are in a much stronger position to voice their views in the media, giving the impression that they have to go out to work, house prices are too high, childcare is too expensive, so the Government must do something. I think that, in most cases, this is not quite true. Many mothers go out to work by choice, simply for additional material gains. There are parents who have different values and choose to make financial sacrifices to stay home and care for their children. I feel it would be wrong if one section benefited to the detriment of the other. If families with stay-at-home mothers are again disadvantaged regarding any possible subsidies, tax breaks or whatever, I would consider it to be unconstitutional.

Christel Sudway, Templeogue, Dublin