The Politics of Families
Sep. 4th, 2004 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpagePursuant to a conversation with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anidada about child care and the difficulties associated with it, I have been thinking again about how our society treats its families, and how it ought to treat them.
First, some context. My husband and I, and most of our family members, are well-educated people who know how to handle kids. We planned when to have our child, and we planned for her arrival and continued growth. We surround her with books, we teach her two languages, we talk, play and sing with her. In short, we're good parents.
Most of our friends are in similar circumstances. As a group, we take parenthood seriously. We're doing this a) because of the biological drive to produce children, obviously; b) because children are important to us, our families and our society; c) because of the joy they bring to our lives.
I teach many families who do not look at children in this light. Many of my students have been the product of teen pregnancies, unplanned and not really wanted. Many live in poverty, because their families are not educated. Many never saw a book or sang a song until they got to school. While children may have been part of the biological drive, for most, they were something that happened rather than something they planned for. Many of these families are on welfare. Effectively, that means their income goes up for every child they produce. I know of at least one woman who, at 22, had three children under the age of five, all of them on the borderline of outright neglect, because the extra baby made a difference in her welfare cheque. Meanwhile, I'm struggling to provide an educational setting for my one child while working full-time, with basically no government support.
(Note: I know very well that not all people on welfare are out to milk the system or use their kids to do so. I'm not trying to categorize all people on welfare as lazy or bad parents. I'm just drawing the comparison between myself and those in the welfare system who I know are both lazy and bad parents.)
If I look at the mix of middle-income and high-income kids as compared to the low-income kids in the two schools I've taught at, I very quickly realize that the low-income kids outnumber the other categories by a significant margin. It is worth noting here that I do not work in an inner-city school. Both of these schools are in suburban neighbourhoods with a mix of subsidized housing (read: welfare) and homes owned by their occupants. I started looking at the families of these kids, and the only significant difference between the various socio-economic levels, that I could see, was the number of children. The higher the family income, the fewer kids they had. The families with five kids and only eight years between eldest and youngest were invariably lower income than the only children or two-child families.
What is happening, then, is that the people most qualified to raise contributing members of society are also the people who are having fewer children. The anecdotal evidence is that many people decide to stop after one or two children, for several reasons:
1) Cost - daycare, maternity leaves, minivans, and all the various sports and activities kids are in cost a fortune, and they can put a serious cramp in the lifestyle of the parents.
2) Age - the better educated you are, the more likely you are to wait to have kids until late twenties, thirties, even forties. Often, there simply isn't time for another.
3) Career - not all parents are interested in putting their families ahead of their career, which they spent years studying for. One or two mat leaves might be all right, but three or four? The boss starts to overlook people for promotion at that stage.
I know many parents who have said something like, "We would have loved to have a second/third/fourth child, but we really couldn't afford it." Then they cite daycare, the difficulties of finding a large enough house, etc, etc.
Our fiscally conservative governments do not help matters. The income tax system in Canada taxes people as individuals unless one parent has less than $7000 annual income, in which case that parent is a financial dependent of the other. Two parents who work full-time, each earning $30 000, pay $6000 less taxes annually than a family where one parent earns $60 000 and the other stays home. Money which was earmarked for new daycare centres was instead funnelled into the regular education system, or the health care system. Most daycare centres are completely unregulated. Very few of them will accommodate any work schedule other than nine-to-five. The conservative parties in Canada are still fighting against the proposed universal daycare system, preferring instead to give a tax cut to middle-income families. The province of Quebec has challenged the legality of the federal government using Employment Insurance as a way to provide parental leave. EI pays a maximum of $20 000 annually, which is significantly less than half the average salary of many professional people. (It represented about 45% of my salary at the time.) All of this leaves new parents with too little money to do the things they want to do for their kids, or with no system in place to provide the education they want for their young children.
As a society, we need educated career women to be having babies. These women model many things for their children: work ethic, the value of education, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, to name a few. Yet we are not supporting these women when they have children, so many of them give up on their dreams of larger families. Supporting the families which contribute most to our society requires several steps to be taken soon.
First, we need to permit alternate uses of EI to allow for extended part-time leaves while women have small children. Some possibilities include waiving the income cap for people on parental leave, so they are allowed to supplement their EI earnings; allowing people who intend to have families to pay extra into EI during their working years, so that they can take longer leaves when they have families. Then, we need to improve the care system by: providing capital funding for daycares to be built in all new school buildings; increasing the number of subsidized spots in daycares; increasing the eligibility requirements for these slots; creating Early Childhood Education degrees which would streamline care requirements for children from birth through age seven, including play groups, preschool, and after-school care; extending and improving school-age afterhours care, especially geared to the children of shiftworkers. Lastly, we need to ensure that parents at all income levels can take advantage of the improvements, so that the gap between income levels lessens with time. Catching poor kids when they're two instead of five would go a long way to improving their overall education.
Comments appreciated, as always. :)
anidada about child care and the difficulties associated with it, I have been thinking again about how our society treats its families, and how it ought to treat them.First, some context. My husband and I, and most of our family members, are well-educated people who know how to handle kids. We planned when to have our child, and we planned for her arrival and continued growth. We surround her with books, we teach her two languages, we talk, play and sing with her. In short, we're good parents.
Most of our friends are in similar circumstances. As a group, we take parenthood seriously. We're doing this a) because of the biological drive to produce children, obviously; b) because children are important to us, our families and our society; c) because of the joy they bring to our lives.
I teach many families who do not look at children in this light. Many of my students have been the product of teen pregnancies, unplanned and not really wanted. Many live in poverty, because their families are not educated. Many never saw a book or sang a song until they got to school. While children may have been part of the biological drive, for most, they were something that happened rather than something they planned for. Many of these families are on welfare. Effectively, that means their income goes up for every child they produce. I know of at least one woman who, at 22, had three children under the age of five, all of them on the borderline of outright neglect, because the extra baby made a difference in her welfare cheque. Meanwhile, I'm struggling to provide an educational setting for my one child while working full-time, with basically no government support.
(Note: I know very well that not all people on welfare are out to milk the system or use their kids to do so. I'm not trying to categorize all people on welfare as lazy or bad parents. I'm just drawing the comparison between myself and those in the welfare system who I know are both lazy and bad parents.)
If I look at the mix of middle-income and high-income kids as compared to the low-income kids in the two schools I've taught at, I very quickly realize that the low-income kids outnumber the other categories by a significant margin. It is worth noting here that I do not work in an inner-city school. Both of these schools are in suburban neighbourhoods with a mix of subsidized housing (read: welfare) and homes owned by their occupants. I started looking at the families of these kids, and the only significant difference between the various socio-economic levels, that I could see, was the number of children. The higher the family income, the fewer kids they had. The families with five kids and only eight years between eldest and youngest were invariably lower income than the only children or two-child families.
What is happening, then, is that the people most qualified to raise contributing members of society are also the people who are having fewer children. The anecdotal evidence is that many people decide to stop after one or two children, for several reasons:
1) Cost - daycare, maternity leaves, minivans, and all the various sports and activities kids are in cost a fortune, and they can put a serious cramp in the lifestyle of the parents.
2) Age - the better educated you are, the more likely you are to wait to have kids until late twenties, thirties, even forties. Often, there simply isn't time for another.
3) Career - not all parents are interested in putting their families ahead of their career, which they spent years studying for. One or two mat leaves might be all right, but three or four? The boss starts to overlook people for promotion at that stage.
I know many parents who have said something like, "We would have loved to have a second/third/fourth child, but we really couldn't afford it." Then they cite daycare, the difficulties of finding a large enough house, etc, etc.
Our fiscally conservative governments do not help matters. The income tax system in Canada taxes people as individuals unless one parent has less than $7000 annual income, in which case that parent is a financial dependent of the other. Two parents who work full-time, each earning $30 000, pay $6000 less taxes annually than a family where one parent earns $60 000 and the other stays home. Money which was earmarked for new daycare centres was instead funnelled into the regular education system, or the health care system. Most daycare centres are completely unregulated. Very few of them will accommodate any work schedule other than nine-to-five. The conservative parties in Canada are still fighting against the proposed universal daycare system, preferring instead to give a tax cut to middle-income families. The province of Quebec has challenged the legality of the federal government using Employment Insurance as a way to provide parental leave. EI pays a maximum of $20 000 annually, which is significantly less than half the average salary of many professional people. (It represented about 45% of my salary at the time.) All of this leaves new parents with too little money to do the things they want to do for their kids, or with no system in place to provide the education they want for their young children.
As a society, we need educated career women to be having babies. These women model many things for their children: work ethic, the value of education, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, to name a few. Yet we are not supporting these women when they have children, so many of them give up on their dreams of larger families. Supporting the families which contribute most to our society requires several steps to be taken soon.
First, we need to permit alternate uses of EI to allow for extended part-time leaves while women have small children. Some possibilities include waiving the income cap for people on parental leave, so they are allowed to supplement their EI earnings; allowing people who intend to have families to pay extra into EI during their working years, so that they can take longer leaves when they have families. Then, we need to improve the care system by: providing capital funding for daycares to be built in all new school buildings; increasing the number of subsidized spots in daycares; increasing the eligibility requirements for these slots; creating Early Childhood Education degrees which would streamline care requirements for children from birth through age seven, including play groups, preschool, and after-school care; extending and improving school-age afterhours care, especially geared to the children of shiftworkers. Lastly, we need to ensure that parents at all income levels can take advantage of the improvements, so that the gap between income levels lessens with time. Catching poor kids when they're two instead of five would go a long way to improving their overall education.
Comments appreciated, as always. :)