SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Child care emotive issue in Aust.

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33417, 26 December 1973, Page 5

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Child care emotive issue in Aust.

A successful New Zealand scheme Jias formed lhe basis for the suggestion that .30,000 mothers should be employed in Australia to care for up to Jive children—including their own—in their own homes.

The suggestion is the major recommendation of the report of the Australian pre-schools committee on the care and education of young children set up by the Federal Government in February to implement the Labour Party's pre-election promise that pre-school education would be available for every child. The report calls on the Federal Government to provide sBoom for pre-school and child care centres over the next 12 years. The five child family day care centre, says the report, would , be supervised by trained child care specialists who would visit the homes ;and advise the mothers. The i cost of establishing the system and operating it would Ibe “relatively modest” compared with full day care centres of the conventional kind, and most of the spending for child care should go to this kind of centre.

POLITICAL ISSUE The suggestion didn’t blow up an immediate storm of reaction, although in Sydney at least it appeared in a week when the Sydney Day Nurseries Association had been forced to deal the death blow to two of its old nurseries in inner city areas

so that they can be demo-: lished and rebuilt. The child-1 ren, a total of 175 mostly! from one-parent families,! will have to be found some-! where else to go in the daytime—no easy matter in; Sydney where child care fa-1 cilities are woefully in-j adequate. ■ In fact the whole area of! child care has become a highly emotive subject and

very much of a political iissue as more and more! I women go back to work, I either because they need to forwantto. To the cynic, the five-child iday care centre might smack ’of a certain expediency, as ■ might certain expert opinion being increasingly expressed las to the value of con-1 [ventional pre-school I centres—kindergartens for!

instance. That kind of opinion can only be calculated to confuse the parent conditioned to think that, the child who had the advantage of the pre-school “kindy” experience was getting ~ a good start for school and later. The concept of paying mothers to look after up to five children including their own seems an odd addendum to the Federal Government’s announcement that it does not intend to do anything immediately on the question of making some sort of payment to women who want to stay at home and look after their children.

CAUTIOUS REACTION So far, however, the Federal Government has not made any firm decision on the. committee’s report and the whole question is up for discussion. Initial reaction was fairly cautious although it did include a slightly starry-eyed newspaper editorial which hailed it as putting a value on a mother’s love. President of the N.S.W. Federation of Infants Schools Clubs, Mrs Joan Brown, said she would like to know a lot more about [how the scheme would operate.

If it was noted that the scheme would be purely child care and not. pre-school education it might be a good idea but a lot of people thought that pre-school education consisted solely of looking after children from nine to five. There was a. Jot more to it, she said, than that. However, the Federal Government is hardly likely to rush the scheme into operation immediately although its early implementation was another committee recommendation.

Problems of implementation will delay its early introduction. And if. and when, it starts it will be on a needs basis with working class and inner city areas getting the first centres.