Calls for more childcare regulation miss the obvious point

Sydney Morning Herald

18 hours ago

The cliche used to be that a predictable response would come 'like clockwork'. Surely it's time to update that in the age of artificial intelligence 'large language' models. Calls for more regulation in the childcare sector following the horrific allegations against alleged childcare rapist Joshua Dale Brown, who has caused 1200 tiny children to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases, are as predictable as ChatGPT.
AI rows up everything that has been before and confidently asserts more of the same to be ideal. Similarly, childcare advocates, who too often seem to advocate for childcare rather than children or care, are suggesting that the best response to these distressing revelations is to do even more of the same, but samier.
Will there ever come a point at which these advocates admit that it is not regulation which is the problem, but the system itself? Apparently not. You see, centre-based childcare is, as many of these advocates and numerous commentators have noted, at the heart of society as we have structured it. Women depend on it to be able to return to work after having babies. Families depend on it to be able to afford their mortgage or rent. Our economy depends on it because getting parents back to work increases the government's tax take. All fabulous outcomes, which have absolutely no connection whatsoever with the provision of the best possible care for young children.
But say as much and the advocates will trot out another trope which is as predictable as AI: you're 'mother-shaming', blaming women for choosing to work, or making them feel bad if they can't or don't want to stop working after having children.
This emotive rubbish is part of the reason we never have a proper discussion over whether the policy choices successive governments have made (centre-based childcare has been supported both financially and rhetorically by both Coalition and Labor governments) are the best for anyone forced into the system.
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It is the reason why reports tend to find pleasing benefits from childcare, usually by rolling together studies of children from the ages of zero to five years old, so the benefits of preschool socialisation conceal concerning findings about the negative effects of rotating care by unfamiliar strangers on younger babies.
That, or they roll together the benefits of a childcare environment for children from 'disadvantaged' home environments, with the effects on children without disadvantaged backgrounds, to create a homogenised result. Which inevitably fails to reflect reality.
They have to be separated and they should be separated by policy. It's worth bringing in a longish quote from a literature review conducted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2015 to make this point.