Parent Time

Here’s how the week shapes up for 21-month-old Ryan Kennedy of Vancouver. Monday to Wednesday, he spends the day at a licensed child care centre. Thursday, he’s home with Dad until 3:30, when Tony Kennedy leaves for his afternoon shift as a counsellor in a halfway house. Grandma fills the two-hour gap until Ryan’s mom, Joselyn, gets home from her job as a dietitian. On Fridays, Ryan is home with Mom on her day “off” (she works 30 hours over the other four days). Tony, who works later on Fridays, is around until mid-afternoon.

That’s just one snapshot of the complicated web of child care arrangements Canadian families are using these days.

The Kennedys feel lucky to be able to combine at-home parenting and child care. But it was hard to find part-time licensed care, Joselyn says. “In fact, we had to take and pay for a full-time spot until a part-time space became available three months later.” Landing that full-time spot was a nail-biter: They got the call when Ryan was just a week shy of his first birthday, although they’d been on the waiting list since the third month of Joselyn’s pregnancy. She’d like to see government investment to increase the number of part-time and infant spots in licensed child care centres.

Canadians have been debating child care for years: How much? What kind? Who pays? We’ve heard from politicians and experts. Today’s Parent decided to go to the front lines and talk to families who are trying to care for their kids while earning a living. In an online survey conducted in September, we asked parents what kinds of child care they use, what they think of it, what problems they have and how governments could help.

Our readers were eager to weigh in. Their responses — 5,284 in total, from mostly anglophone, middle-class mothers living outside Quebec – suggest that there’s nothing simple about contemporary families’ child care needs. Specifically:

• Finding, keeping and paying for care isn’t easy.
• Part-time arrangements are common, including having a parent at home.
• Many parents have concerns about the quality of care that’s available to them.
• Parents’ wish list for government child care policy goes well beyond the narrow choices the major parties were offering in the last election campaign (more on that below).
• There’s surprising consensus between employed and stay-at-home parents as to what families really need.

Originally published in Today's Parent, February 2007