Feminist Perspective On Child Care

2.6 The Feminist perspective

Since the earliest settlement, Australian society has traditionally supported primary, secondary, vocational and tertiary education through public funding, with minimal financial support for early childhood education and care provision, resulting in the responsibility for the education and care or children, prior to entering school falling to the private sector and the family (Stooke, 2012). As a consequence, childcare in Australian has evolved over the past hundred years from an area of “interest mainly to charitable groups” made up of “upper-class women” (Brennan, 1998, p.1) to a widely contested politically manipulated area of concern (Brennan, 1998).

Child care was originally viewed as a women’s issue

This goes hand in hand with the need to contribute to the economic security of the family and providing the women with a level of self-sufficiency through paid employment (Thorpe, Cloney & Tayler, 2010), while ensuring their child is cared for in a safe and secure environment. The quality of care provided in early childhood education and care services, can impact on maternal wellbeing in the workplace (Craig, 2007) and can be an emotional barrier to a mother’s decision to engage in paid employment (Bourke, 2006; Harris, 2008).

There is the risk that early childhood service provision may be seen to support female workforce participation, with the perception that “…children may be seen an obstacle to women’s work, with child care considered as a necessary evil” OECD (2006, p. 22). The increased workforce participation of many mothers, may adversely affect children, unless high-quality, affordable early learning and care facilities are readily available (Sylva et al. 2009).

This has become an even greater concern for parents with school aged children, with mothers having to work longer hours. Many families having become reliant on out-of-school hour’s care programmes, to care for their children before school, from as early as 6.00 a.m. and after school until as late as 6:00

Ms Marie Coleman, Chair, Social Policy Committee, National Foundation for Australian Women (NFWA, 2014), a leading independent women’s advocacy group, stated in an article published by NFWA that, “The debate over childcare reform has been dominated by an emphasis on care arrangements for pre-schoolers, with the shortage of before and after school care programmes now at crisis point, in many densely populated parts of the country and particularly in Sydney” (p.xxxx).

Workforce participation by women has been supported by government policy decisions and incentives in recent years, such as tax relief for child care fees, cash subsidies to the family and paid parental leave (Ray, Gornich & Schmitt, 2010), thereby contributing to Australia’s national economic development, while reducing the number of families on welfare subsidies (Bennett, 2010; Penn,