Basically the child care centers have to be open from 7am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. The local council has the legal responsibility to provide this service. It’s a children’s right, that’s how it’s phrased in the legal regulations.
Between the two parents you get a year-and-a-half off work so before then it’s assumed that one of the parents will be at home with the baby. The reason why there’s a twelve month limit to when they can start is because here there’s also a parental leave system. In your own words, describe how your child care generally works.īasically, there’s universal child care that the government provides from when the child is around a year. ‘Childcare is children’s right.’ Stockholm, Sweden For many families in America, that choice doesn’t exist at all. While no place has a perfect model and there were improvements that could be made across the board (Quebec, for example, has seen worse behavioral and health results for children), the women ELLE spoke to all agreed that without affordable child care, they might have had to make drastically different life and career choices. We talked to three women from different countries or provinces-Sweden, Quebec, and France-about what it’s like to live with robust government-run or subsidized child care systems. After all, many other nations have developed policies that help keep child care affordable and accessible. While Warren’s plan certainly has flaws-such as the fact that it will likely fail to adequately address the lack of quality providers-the idea of universal child care is far from an impossible utopian dream. And the workers who are actually taking care of our children make dismally low wages. Child care is only considered “affordable”-costing 10 percent or less of a family’s income-for the median family in two states. For a typical family living in DC, that amounts to putting 35 percent of their income towards infant care.
In Washington DC, the most expensive place for child care in the country, daycare costs parents $22,631 on average every year according to the Economic Policy Institute.
It’s a pressing feminist imperative-for many parents, daycare is the biggest cost in the first years of their child’s life, a reality that is compounded by a lack of family leave. And the lack of affordable child care has become a national crisis, with daycare costing parents more than in-state tuition in half of the country.Įlizabeth Warren, who made universal child care her first big policy proposal after she announced her presidential run, has helped to put the issue at the front and center. For one of the richest countries in the world, child poverty rates have remained persistently high in America. We lack any sort of child allowance, a monthly or weekly cash supplement from the government to help parents raise children, a policy that is standard fare in most other nations. We are the only industrialized country that doesn’t offer some kind of paid family leave. The United States has always stood out among wealthy nations (and, often, less-than-wealthy nations) for its stark lack of policies that support families.
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