Questioning the narrative

This paper contains academic research modelling and theorising about how to more equally redistribute unpaid carework between parents, giving children better access to parental caregivers in the early years while also reducing the gender inequality that results when women assume most of the unpaid care work. You can find it here.

This paper was written by bestselling author Robin Barker discussing the normalisation and formalisation of childcare and the problems with this model. You can find it here.

This book extensively details research that demonstrates the importance of having constant and consistent access to a primary caregiver in the first three years of a child's life.

In 2006 the government commissioned a study to examine how policy marginalises parents who choose to assume a 'parent only' care model. You can read it here.

In the book Hold On To Your Kids, international authority on child development Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D. joins forces with bestselling author Gabor Maté, M.D., to tackle one of the most disturbing trends of our time: children today increasingly look to their peers for direction—their values, identity, and codes of behaviour. This “peer orientation” undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. You can access the first chapter here.

In this article, parenting expert and best selling author Steve Biddulph writes about the impacts on families of working long hours and 'hypercapitalism'. Read it here.

In 2008, three well-known researchers published a paper looking at the impacts of the introduction of very low-cost child care for children aged 0–4 in Quebec in 1997. They found there was a large increase in women working and in the placement of children in child care, relative to the rest of Canada. They also found that children were worse off on measures ranging from aggression to motor skills to social skills, and that the program led to worse parental health and lower-quality parental relationships. This study focuses on one particular child care program and cannot be extrapolated to all child care scenarios. It ought, however, to give policy makers pause when considering child care initiatives. You can find it here.

This research continued from the 2008 study into the Quebec child care program and showed that “non-cognitive deficits” identified in cohorts of small children who had access to Quebec’s universal child care program persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life, compared to other provinces in Canada. Again, this study focuses on one particular universal childcare program and cannot be extrapolated to all childcare programs but ought to be considered in policy design. You can access the research paper here.

Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that sociologist Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country.

Dr Peter Cook (now deceased) was a child and adult psychiatrist, and held roles such as consultant in child psychiatry with the New South Wales Department of Health at the Queenscliff Health Centre in Sydney, and adviser on child mental health to the Regional Director of the Northern Metropolitan Health Region. Dr Peter Cook asks the important question: "Taking into account the biologically-determined nature and needs of young human beings and their mothers, how, in our de-tribalized societies, can we best help and support parents who wish to do a mutually satisfying job of mothering and fathering their infants and young children without jeopardizing their own futures?" You can access a series of articles written by Dr Cook on these topics here.

University of New England researchers made a submission to the Commonwealth Government's Productivity Commission inquiry into Early Childhood Education and Care to the effect that ECEC does not routinely bring with it enhanced later school achievement and appealed to the Commission not to base policy recommendations on an uncritical acceptance of the mantra that ECEC can only be good for children educationally.  You can read it here.

Early childhood education and care is widely regarded as helping children’s academic, cognitive and social development. This study, published in the journal Behavior Genetics, looked into whether attending preschool or childcare influences later academic achievement.

Researchers found no statistically significant difference between the literacy and numeracy scores of school children who had attended preschool or childcare and children who didn’t. Nor did the duration of preschool or childcare attendance have an impact on later literacy and numeracy scores. Read the article here.