WHENEVER we talk about childcare, we inevitably get caught up in arguments over whether or not mothers of young children should work outside the home. But this isn't really the issue. The care of children is not a question of women's rights to equality and employment, but one of children's rights to be reared in a supportive community environment whether their parents work outside the home or not, believes Kathleen Kennedy, a psychologist and lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Dublin Institute of Technology.
She and Noirin Hayes, head of the school, prefer the term "shared care" to childcare. "I don't think whether or not women should be working outside the home should be the issue. The issue should be the whole idea of sharing the care of children and the community playing a role in the rearing of the citizens of the future who are supposed to be so prized by the Constitution," says Kennedy.
Whether they work outside the home or not, all parents need support; yet for many people the lingering ideal of a happy childhood is a "full time" mother isolated in a house with young children and no support from other adults. But the truth is that this situation can produce stressed out mothers and isolated children:
"The whole social context of the family has changed. It used to be that the children in the 1950s could play safely in the streets and mix with other children. In addition the family size was much larger so that children had company. Today people are terrified to let their children out of their sight because of all the news about sexual abuse. And the family size has been chopped right down to 1.9 children per family. At the same time, people are more isolated in their own little nuclear family units. This all means that there is a need for some kind of a social meeting place both for children and for their parents to have the support that previously was given by small communities and extended families," says Kennedy.
The isolation of the nuclear family goes right across economic barriers and it is even greater for women who choose to stay at home, she adds. Pre school education, with the nurturing of a child's creativity and development, is needed for all children to fulfil their potential, whether they have a full time mother in the home or not.
That said the crisis point in childcare today is where working parents cannot find shared care for their children that they trust. "There is a certain reluctance to provide care for the increasing numbers of mothers working outside the home because of the ambivalence towards women making careers outside the home. In addition, we are still ruled by male politicians and therefore childcare is not a political issue, Kennedy says.
"Scratch the surface of most Irish men and they want a traditional Irish woman at home. They may not admit it, but they would encourage women not to work and start thinking about things."
The consequent lack of political will has meant that our children are paying the price of fragmented, ad hoc services funded in a variety of ways through the voluntary sector with no consistent standards. "There is a lack of any integrated policy and a lack of any sense that childcare is a priority," Kennedy says.
This was recognised as far back as 1983 in the Working Party on Child Care Facilities for Working Parents, a report to Minister for Labour.
The exception is the pre school care organised separately by the Department of Health and the Department of Education, but it is targeted only at disadvantaged children in certain areas, which she believes has made their service "ghettoised, fragmented and stigmatising". Places are also severely limited, with only 1,367 full time (i.e. until 3.30 p.m. daily) and part time nursery places in the Eastern Health Board area, according to its own 1995 report on childcare services.
"Ireland has one of the lowest incidence of services for the under fours in Europe," says Kennedy. We are third worst in the league, although many believe that we should be at the bottom our figures look better than they, are because we put four year olds into primary school, something which other European countries never do as they regard four as too young for formal education. Most of Europe's four, five and six year olds are in pre school programmes and kindergartens, designed for their unique developmental stage, when attitudes are formed along with skills.
Most parents in the Republic must purchase pre school education privately. Kennedy is worried that many pre schoolers are in inadequate, ad hoc childcare situations with untrained people where they are not getting the kind of stimulation they need. My concern is not so much that children would be damaged but that their potential would not be fulfilled. Half of a child's intelligence is developed before the age of four. There's great development in the pre school years because their brain is a malleable organ. The human brain is the most plastic of any species and the cultural input it receives in the early stages, is very, very important. You are learning how to communicate attitudes about yourself and your moral values. The rich connection of networks' in the brain are also being formed and nobody really knows a great deal about what effect it has when children do not get the stimulation they need."
The very term "childcare" seems to limit the activity to one that implies a very low level of physical nurturing rather than an educational, developmental perspective, she adds. The fact that the career doesn't even enter CSO statistics and is classed as domestic work by the Revenue Commissioners betrays our attitude that anyone can do it.
Yet we need highly skilled people to work with children, she argues. The utter lack of regulation of training and personnel means that we don't even have minimum standards. Even Section VII of the Childcare Act, to be implemented later this year, focuses on issues of space and hygiene rather than child/staff ratios, training or curriculum.
The unregulated areas in which children come face to face with possibly untrained carers include private pre schools, private nurseries and creches, after school care, family day care either in the childminder's or the child's home and community playgroups.
In Kennedy's view, we should not be worried about which type of care is intrinsically best - creche v childminder, for example. Instead, we should recognise the need for many options and ensure that all of them offer quality care from trained people.
"What needs to happen first is for people to sit down and think through the issues at government level, at the policy making level, and to accept that if you are going to have shared care for children, it should be quality care and to then face the costing implications of that decision and what this implies," she says.
"I believe that we should not aspire to services which are more than just not harmful to children," she, says. "We should go for a service which is positive, good and life enhancing to all families and children."