The Daycare System is Failing and Here’s Why
I’ve only been an Early Childhood Educator for a short time, but I’ve always been a discerning observer and analyzer. Before I pursued what I thought was a career in education, I worked in hospitality and private residential housekeeping; job roles that might seem trivial to some, but to me, they were a meditative practice in self-discipline, time management, and problem-solving. I have also worked in the technology sector, operated a cleaning business, assisted instructors at a sewing shop, and sold handmade goods at local artisan markets. I look at every job I’ve had as an opportunity to learn and grow. No time I’ve spent at any single job has been wasted. They are all valuable experiences I can draw from and my gained skillsets complement the various roles I embody in my life. Changing jobs is a natural process for me. I enjoy learning new things and I embrace unique opportunities. It was no surprise that at 39, I decided to embark on a career in early childhood education.
I was working in a sewing shop that offered basic to advanced sewing workshops for adults and after-school programs for children ages eight to thirteen when I realized I loved teaching. I also assisted with craft-related birthday party celebrations for children as young as five. The teaching process felt natural to me. But the thought of going back to school at nearly forty years old was daunting. I couldn’t fathom taking a four-year bachelor’s degree and two years of teacher’s college at that point. It just wasn’t going to happen, both practically and financially, so I took an online course in early childhood education while I worked part-time at the sewing shop.
It was the end of 2019 by the time I completed my program. Covid was lurking on the sidelines, and I was about to enter an evolving industry high in demand yet falling apart at the seams. Like anyone starting a new career, I had big plans, which included opening a preschool equipped with my very own philosophy and curriculum. Let’s just say, things haven’t worked out as planned. More on this later.
Despite my enthusiasm for spending my days with children under five, daycare is a foreign world to my experience growing up. I was raised by a stay-at-home mom. I began attending school when I was five. I had an idyllic childhood where I was free to roam my neighborhood and spend most of my time exploring outdoors. Although my mom had rules, I did not have a structured day other than bedtime and mealtimes. In fact, I rarely ventured outside of my cul-de-sac neighborhood full of stay-at-home kids. Spending my time in a vehicle meant a short trip to the grocery store once per week or less or a family summer trip to see my grandparents, unlike the average child today who is in a family vehicle multiple times per day. My school was also right behind my family home, so my sister walked me to school until I was old enough to do so myself. That was also the 1980s and the only kids I knew in daycare were the handful of children that had moms that worked full-time.
Today’s world is different. The vast majority of households have two full-time working parents, many not by choice. The rising cost of living and societal demands and expectations are forcing parents to opt their children into daycare with many parents placing their child’s name on a center waitlist before they are even born, something only high society New Yorkers used to do a couple of decades ago. The pressure for both parents to be at a job from 8 am to 5 pm is increasing as inflation rears its ugly head and children are suffering. We pretend this is normal, but it is anything but. The truth is, other people are raising your children. We have essentially created a nanny state for our children. Although I believe in the pure idea of It Takes A Village, gone are the days when children were raised in small towns mainly by their parents and sometimes under the watchful eye of neighbors, friends, and extended family. We are now entrusting our children to strangers who at times do not share our values for the entire work week. As a consequence, we are forcing our children into stressful environments that lack adequate support systems.
Here is why, in my educated opinion, and experience, the childcare industry is failing and what we can do about it:
Children under five do not belong in a structured program for more than a few hours per day. Preschool children have short attention spans. Their brains are not equipped to handle loads of information and stimulation for extended periods. This is affecting how they behave and how they learn.
We have created a generation of children who are labeled with all kinds of disorders. Some are valid diagnoses, but many are a result of inadequate childcare. The average preschool child lasts about five hours at daycare before they begin to emotionally deregulate, meaning it’s time to go home. That’s the overload point for most and for some children, it’s four hours.
Parents need to reevaluate the importance and necessity of full-time work schedules before a child is kindergarten age. This planning should be ideally incorporated into a child-rearing plan before a baby is born. I understand that everyone is in a different situation and single parents often have no choice, but perhaps there are alternatives such as having a family member take your child one day per week or more if that is an option, so they are not in a center all week. Other alternatives are to seek out community supports to supplement a 40-hour work week or work from home if it’s feasible. The reality is children under five need to be with their parents as much as possible. Find a way to make that happen!
Preschool children are not meant to spend an entire day in a classroom with twenty other children. I imagine some parents think their child is getting a lot of one-on-one support and others want to ignore the fact that their children are thrown into a group of children for eight and sometimes nine hours per day who have various personalities, behaviors, and not-so-savory coping mechanisms. Believe me, some days daycares look like an insane asylum more than a picturesque Mary Poppins preschool. Kids are screaming and throwing things, children are pooping in their pants during free play, and other children are wrestling in the corner until a teacher comes over to break it up. Early childhood educators spend more than half their day just putting out fires and managing children’s behaviors and emotions. The teaching and guiding part of early childhood education happens, but at short intervals throughout the day. This brings me to my next point.
The childcare industry is in a crisis. There are a few reasons for this. One is staff shortages. In the childcare industry, we have strict child-to-teacher ratios that we must follow according to childcare licensing standards. Most daycares now do not have enough qualified staff to fill these spots, which means sometimes we are not in ratio. Often managers and administrative staff will step in to cover shifts or after-school care staff if a center is lucky enough to have an after-school care program. This leaves early childhood educators mentally and physically taxed and takes more time away from one-on-one time with children. It also disrupts the day and makes planning and scheduling challenging.
I believe that staff shortages in childcare are for two reasons: long hours and low wages. In Canada, the government has stepped in to top up early childhood educators’ wages by $4/hour, but with rising inflation on food and housing, a $22/hour job with a $4/hour top-up isn’t enough to support a single working individual in Canada. Sure, you can put a roof over your head, buy modest amounts of groceries, and put gas in a used car, but you are scraping by. You can forget about retirement, savings, or any investments in your future. I can go to McDonald’s and get a job for the same wage with far less responsibility and better benefits.
Most early childhood educators work nine to ten-hour days without overtime pay. Some centers will rotate four-day working shifts so that if their staff work ten-hour days, they only work four days per week. This is not the case with nine-hour days. They give you a one-hour lunch and call it an eight-hour day. I understand that many other sectors and industries require their employees to work more than eight hours per day, but productivity drops after six hours and when you’re working with children, it makes for a very long and exhausting day. Most early childhood educators I talk to have nothing left of themselves by the weekend or call in sick repeatedly due to exhaustion.
Governments are making it harder for private centers to operate. The Canadian government would prefer that all daycare centers were public and operated by the school boards. We can see from the current state of public educational institutions this is becoming an increasingly bad idea. The government used to provide grants to private daycare operators, but they have now allotted that money to the public and non-profit sectors of early childhood education, particularly those operating on school board properties. One reason for this reallotment is that daycares are more accessible to families at all income levels, but the downside of this is that families can now take advantage of cheap daycare at a cost to quality and government control over your children. In the end, everyone loses as the public education system does not have the expertise to develop quality daycare programs, and early childhood educators who want to start their own daycare or preschool are forced into working for an employer for long hours and low wages due to financial constraints and lack of support for daycare startups. Employers are also losing this game by the increased pressures on childcare demands, low staffing levels, and government bureaucracy.
There are a few things that could change the course of this inevitable fall by changing how we perceive the necessity for childcare and the value of supporting preschool programs in place of general daycare. First, I’ll explain the difference between preschools and daycares:
Daycares are childcare centers that typically run five days per week for eight to nine hours per day anywhere from 7 am to 6:30 pm. Many of these centers are integrated with an afterschool care program for children five to twelve years of age. These are the centers that have staffing shortages and low wages.
Preschools are niche programs that run for about four hours per day. Some are five days per week and others are three to four days per week. An example of a preschool program is a Montessori program, but there are many different preschools to choose from, at least for now. Preschools are more likely to pay their staff a competitive wage and benefits, with some centers providing afterschool care for families and staff that need the additional hours. They also typically have proper teacher-to-child ratios with smaller classroom sizes.
Government intervention is placing more pressure on preschools as most operate as private businesses and do not offer full-day programs that are accessible to all income levels. There is a reason for that. Preschools exist to provide children with a well-rounded educational environment that is age-appropriate, meaning they operate for a few hours per day and a few days per week working with children’s natural learning processes. They hire qualified, well-trained staff and pay them accordingly. These are precisely the programs we should be promoting and supporting above and beyond the daycares that cater to adult work schedules. But unfortunately, it is the other way around.
When I was going to school, I did an observation practicum at a small eight-child daycare in a house in a family neighborhood. This was a proper childcare center that focused on a preschool curriculum but operated within the hours of 8 am to 4:30 pm like a daycare program. The woman that runs the daycare is from Slovenia. She has been living in Canada for about twenty years. She told me that in Slovenia childcare centers pay their staff annual salaries and split the daycare staff hours into morning and afternoon shifts to avoid employee burnout. This way they receive a full-time salary without having to work long hours. Why are we not doing this in Canada? If employees are not valued, they will trade their profession for another skill set that will provide them with value. I’m about to change careers as I write this.
There needs to be more emphasis on preschool education and less importance placed on high-demand daycare. Daycare serves its purpose, to provide working parents with an affordable option for childcare, but I see stay-at-home parents placing their children in daycare programs from 9 am to 3 pm daily like it’s a preschool program, and many parents using it as an alternative to raising their children. I spend more time with some families’ children than they do. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with children and guiding them through their growth and development, but they need their parents’ time and attention far more than they need structured preschool education.
We are looking in the wrong direction. The increased cost of living has put pressure on families, but we are also allowing this to take over our children’s well-being and the health of our families and communities. Parents need to reevaluate why they are using daycare and understand the significance of raising their children at home, especially before five years old.
When are we going to take responsibility for our children and stop expecting daycares and governments to care for them? We are heading in a dangerous direction. There are several reasons why the daycare industry is failing, but ultimately it is because it is not a natural environment for our children to be in all day long. I believe children are our teachers. They reflect our societal health and well-being and we are not in a good place. All you have to do is look at the increase in behavioral problems and psychopathies in children nowadays to see that we are taking the wrong approach to childcare.
S. Angell is a published poet, writer, philosopher, video blogger, and preschool teacher by day. She explores an array of topics including love, life, death, history, and society from a philosophical perspective. You can find her on Instagram @therainydaypoetess or TheRainyDayPoet.com
