Child Care Today Getting It Right for Everyone

by Leach, Penelope

• ISBN13: 9781400077212
• ISBN10: 1400077214
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-09
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Penelope Leach, the universally admired author of the best-selling classicYourBaby and Child,diagnoses the state of child care in America and the world today. Who is caring for todayrs"s children? How well are they succeeding? What does care cost, and who is paying for it? Leach answers these and other urgent questions with facts and figures gathered from the most current research, brought to life by the voices of parents, including those involved in her own five-year study. She highlights the urgent need in America today for measures to raise the quality of child care and to make the best care we can provide available to all families, just as it is in most other developed nations. Setting out clearly and candidly what is known about every aspect of child care-including the often hidden feelings and fears of parents-Leach presents a critical case for change.

Author Biography

Penelope Leach was educated at Cambridge University and at the London School of Economics, where she received her Ph.D. in psychology, after which she studied many aspects of child development and child rearing under the auspices of Britain’s Medical Research Council. A Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a founding member of the U.K. branch of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, she works on both sides of the Atlantic in various capacities for organizations concerned with prenatal care and birth, family-friendly working practices, day care, and early years education. She has recently co-directed a major program of research in the United Kingdom into the effects of various forms and combinations of care on children’s development from birth to school age. Penelope Leach has two children and six grandchildren and lives in Lewes, England.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

1. The Context for Child Care

This ought to be the best time to become a parent that there has ever been. The stream of scientific information about fetal, infant, and child development is at an all-time high and still rising. There’s more government and media interest in families, parenting, and small- child-related issues than ever before, and parents and stepparents— grandparents, too—are increasingly thoughtful about what and how they are doing.

Not everyone is interested in becoming a parent, of course, but not everyone has to. This millennium-spanning generation of women has an unprecedented amount of control over its childbearing. An active sex life and no children is socially acceptable and physiologically possible in most of the developed world, and many people opt for it. Low fertility (or no male partner) and children is not quite so easy, but assisted conception is now available in most of the Western world (though whether as a right or a big business depends on where you live) and is astonishingly widely used, often by individuals who would not have seen themselves as prospective parents a generation ago, including women past menopause and gay couples.

Throughout the postindustrial world, however, women are having fewer babies than ever before, and while mondially falling birth rates may do something to slow the overpopulation of the planet, falling birth rates in developed areas mean “aging populations” and, thirty years into the future, a real threat to economies. The 2006 Canadian census shows that the number of people over age sixty-five has gone up by almost 12 percent since 2001, while the number under age fifteen has dropped more than 2 percent in the same period. An aging population, better described as a shortage of young people, not only means that a larger proportion of the population will be retired and dependent on pensions and care arrangements that a smaller proportion of people of working age are going to have to finance; it also means fewer young people acquiring and disseminating the new skills on which employment will increasingly depend. So, in the long term, we need our populations to produce the next generation of workers, and countries that do—such as the United States, which saw a fractional increase from 64 infants per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 1996 to 66.3 in 2004—will be at an enormous advantage if it is maintained. The assumption that countries with very low birth rates can turn to migrants instead ignores the real math. If a country such as Italy continued with its current fertility rate of about 1.3 (instead of the 2.0 that would replace each couple with two offspring) for more than a generation, its labor supply would drop by about 10 million workers. It is inconceivable that Italy, or indeed any nation, could attract such a large number of employable immigrants or absorb them.

It is difficult to see a future shortage of labor as an urgent problem in countries where unemployment rates are high, as they have been, for example, in Germany and Spain. However, it is now generally realized that current unemployment comes about less because there are too many workers than because too few of the available workers have the requisite skills. Indeed, if the birth rate stayed so low that there was a catastrophic shortage of labor in thirty years, there would probably still be a high rate of unemployment among inadequately skilled workers, many of them approaching retirement age, who were no longer employable in the jobs available.

What do birth rates now and labor supplies in the future have to do with child care? The link is women’s participation in the labor market. A generation ago, the women who didn’t work outside their homes were the ones who had the most children, and that is still the case in some parts of the world. In most countries, though, that situation has now reversed so that it is c

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Excerpted from Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone by Penelope Leach
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