Vox: Quebec Daycare Expansion worsened kids' life outcomes

[niq]

www.vox.com/2015/9/24/9391625/quebec-daycare-study

It's way too long to quote, but the TL/DR is that Quebec massively expanded child care, and the price to the consumer was very low -- $5/day (so $1200/year), less if for low-income households. More children enrolled in daycare, and more parents (mostly mothers) joined the workforce. But the children who were in daycare had worse quality-of-life outcomes as teenagers (more criminal behavior, self-reported poor mental health ) vs comparable children who were eligible but didn't enroll, or compared to their peers in other provinces.

I don't really have anything to add, other than achieving to the Nordic utopia of cheap, universal, high quality child care would be both difficult and immensely expensive.

I don't know which Canadians live in Quebec, if they have any lived experience they would like to add.

ETA to be clear, the program is still in place; the study is just retrospectively looking at the life outcomes of early enrollees.

[Deleted]

I have 2 friends that live in Quebec, but their kid is very young (<1) and probably don't have much to say. I find this fascinating, though.

[Deleted]

Well I think it raises interesting points about improving the economy.
However, the article states that they basically ran out of spaces so had to resort to bad spaces. This seems lazy. And also seems like something that could be improved.

I also wonder about the timing of the article and the current Canadian election where subsidizing childcare and creating childcare spots are hot issues.

[papie]

I have to admit that I only scanned the article, but I fail to note where they explain the objectives, hypothesis and methodology of the research. Because the way the article is written is a crock of shit. Our program may not be perfect, but it has increased women presence in the work force, and it has been offering high quality daycares at very little cost. The issues with the program lay with the fact that instead of creating more CPEs, which are not for profit daycares that apply high quality of standards, it started subsidizing for profit daycares with the same idea. Those daycares offer much lower quality of services in order to make a profit with the same subsidy as the CPE.

I've been on the board of my CPE for several years and the chair for two years now and it is am amazing program, with high standards. Our kids come out as ready for K as if they had attended a fancy preschool. Our CPE also manages 550 inhume daycare subsidized spots, and again, maybe the quality varies, but they do an amazing job overseeing it, and lots of those inhume daycares are wonderful.

I think a lot of the critics of the program are simply looking for ways in which such a program MUST be too good to be true. It's not.

[loira]

I don't know. I feel like this is one of those correlation but not causation things. I don't know what the eligibility entailed, but chances are the children who didn't enroll came from families who were well off enough to afford a private daycare, nanny, or for a parent to stay at home, and therefore report higher life satisfaction due to that.

[papie]

Sept 24, 2015 13:34:22 GMT -5 @hannymaren said:

Well I think it raises interesting points about improving the economy.
However, the article states that they basically ran out of spaces so had to resort to bad spaces. This seems lazy. And also seems like something that could be improved.

Change of government.  The program was created by the Parti Québécois and the Liberal Party of Quebec always disapproved it and deemed it a waste of money.  Since the liberals have been in power, they've been decreasing funding like crazy, to the point of putting the CPE in almost bankruptcy, which no rhyme or reason imo.  And I say that as someone who voted for them...

[papie]

Sept 24, 2015 13:38:22 GMT -5 loira said:

 I don't know what the eligibility entailed, but chances are the children who didn't enroll came from families who were well off enough to afford a private daycare, nanny, or for a parent to stay at home, and therefore report higher life satisfaction due to that.

Everybody is eligible.  

and it kills me they are talking about it in past tense.  THIS PROGRAM IS STILL IN PLACE.  lol

[loira]

Sept 24, 2015 13:40:44 GMT -5 papie said:

Sept 24, 2015 13:38:22 GMT -5 loira said:

 I don't know what the eligibility entailed, but chances are the children who didn't enroll came from families who were well off enough to afford a private daycare, nanny, or for a parent to stay at home, and therefore report higher life satisfaction due to that.

Everybody is eligible.  

and it kills me they are talking about it in past tense.  THIS PROGRAM IS STILL IN PLACE.  lol

Good to know! I'm obviously too young to have participated in this particular programme, but I went to a garderie in Montreal for a couple of years as a child (actually this one, which is now a CPE daycare gw.micro-acces.com/cpechezpicotine/Publique/PagePersonnelle.aspx?SectionId=7&No=15). I turned out just fine.

[niq]

Sept 24, 2015 13:37:42 GMT -5 papie said:

I have to admit that I only scanned the article, but I fail to note where they explain the objectives, hypothesis and methodology of the research. Because the way the article is written is a crock of shit. Our program may not be perfect, but it has increased women presence in the work force, and it has been offering high quality daycares at very little cost. The issues with the program lay with the fact that instead of creating more CPEs, which are not for profit daycares that apply high quality of standards, it started subsidizing for profit daycares with the same idea. Those daycares offer much lower quality of services in order to make a profit with the same subsidy as the CPE.

I've been on the board of my CPE for several years and the chair for two years now and it is am amazing program, with high standards. Our kids come out as ready for K as if they had attended a fancy preschool. Our CPE also manages 550 inhume daycare subsidized spots, and again, maybe the quality varies, but they do an amazing job overseeing it, and lots of those inhume daycares are wonderful.

I think a lot of the critics of the program are simply looking for ways in which such a program MUST be too good to be true. It's not.

I think the point the article is trying to make is that scaling out child care is hard. Someone can say "okay, every kid should be able to go to a high quality child care facility", but then how do we actually ensure that there are enough child care providers? Okay, we're going to create CPEs; how do we staff them and make sure everyone's adequately trained?

With the ACA/Obamacare rollout there was a lot of concern that the newly insured patients would overload the providers. And that's in an industry where a lot of the jobs are relatively well paying, so the problem there is mostly how do you train and/or import enough nurses, medical assistants, medical bill transcribers (FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU), etc.; can you loosen the scope of practice laws so that ARNPs can do more stuff and take some of the load (and high wages!) off of MDs; etc.

But for child care the problem is much worse. You have to find people -- hopefully people with at least some post-high school education (!!) willing to deal with screaming toddlers for $12/hour. You have to buy real estate in a lot of potentially expensive places. It's not "more daycare = bad" so much as "it's very hard to provide enough good daycare to make sure that more daycare = good".

It does sound like there were political decisions that made it harder for the program to succeed. But, how much tax revenue would you have to raise in order to create enough CPEs? Would the Canadian public be willing to vote for that level of taxation?