Australia

Home is always superior to day care until a child is able to play with other children - about age three. At age three, children really want to play with other children simply because they are "their own kind." They want to move quickly, explore, and find out for themselves, and someone eye to eye who has the same energy is just the ticket.

Good childcare whether it's a school, a play center, a play group, or whatever adults choose to call it is a world for children and all the adults have a responsibility to not only voice their opinions but make sure the environment continues to be a place where children can learn, because learning is what children want to do MOST!

Here is an opinion from Australia. They have the same problems as we do, only from this letter, it sounds a lot worse.

OPINION
Elizabeth Meryment
Australia

The battle between working and non-working mothers has always been vitriolic, but recently stay-at-home mothers seem to have gained the moral ascendancy. To have a child in long-day care is more often becoming frowned on by the stay-at-home team as a mild form of child abuse.

Partly this has sprung from academic Anne Manne's book Motherhood, in which she cites research that claims young children suffer increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol when they are in organised care. While many have dismissed her book as pompous drivel, the debate rages on.

This is an emotive argument, if also an academic one, because the reality of today's society is that women with children work in large numbers, whether that's because they want to or because they need to. Commentators can argue away about the merits of home-based or organised child care, but long-daycare centres are here and people most definitely want to use them, even many mothers who don't have jobs.

In The Australian last week, the Clovelly Child Care Centre in Sydney's eastern suburbs was reported as having 700 children on its waiting list, 400 of whom were younger than two.
"We might offer eight places out per year in our under-two group," said the centre's Sally Anderson. "We are a non-profit centre so people tend to flock to us. But supply just doesn't meet demand."

That the centre is non-profit is important because the price of child care in many places is becoming utterly outrageous, with some centres charging $105 a day per child.

The reasons child care has become so expensive are twofold. One is because working mothers - most of whom do not work full time and use child care only a few days a week - want excellent care for their children and are prepared to pay for the best available. The other is this Government's ideologically driven childcare policies.

Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson often proffers predictable rhetoric about how well the Government funds the childcare sector. But one of the Howard Government's first decisions on taking office in 1996 was to slash $500 million from childcare funding. This severely dented the industry and nearly a decade later those suffering for it are the working mothers forced to fork out large parts of their pay for the privilege of being taxpayers, a double insult as they are also denied government benefits offered to stay-at-home mothers.

And it's not only working mothers who are suffering: it's their children who are really copping it.
Having spent some time visiting childcare centres in Sydney lately, I can see why some children suffer stress when they are there. Some of these places are soulless, overpopulated institutions filled with often sick children who spread colds and flu to each other. I certainly wouldn't like to spend time there, let alone place a small child in one. Some of the places I've seen have lax security and bricked-in playgrounds, others have inadequate supervision.

At one expensive place I saw young babies left to sleep on their bellies, with pillows and quilts in their cots, in contravention of everything one is warned about for the prevention of sudden infant death syndrome. One baby had been in this dire place five days a week from six weeks of age. Without wanting to get too deeply into the stay-at-home v work debate, this hardly seems ideal; nobody could sensibly deny that very young babies need their mothers to be with them most of the time.

This isn't to say that organised child care can't be good for young children, especially a few days a week for older babies and toddlers. As the youngest child in a large family, I remember being stuck at home alone with my mother while my older sisters were at school. Although my mother did her best to amuse me, I remember the loneliness and boredom of days filled with solo tea parties at the bottom of the garden with only teddy for company. My first day at school was complete happiness.

So I'm sure organised child care can be helpful not only for mothers but for children, and there are some excellent centres where small numbers of happy children are looked after by kind staff who clearly adore them. The children, especially first or last children or those from small families, learn to socialise, play and share, are amused all day and give their parents a break.

This is the sort of environment that should be available for all small children in care and the question is why really good care should not be available to all children who use it. Why should children be getting stressed out in overcrowded, underfunded centres? The first step is decent federal funding and childcare subsidies.

Whether children should be in child care is moot. But they are in child care whether commentators think they should be or not. The question should be how to improve the care children receive and make top-quality child care affordable for every child using it. After all, it is the children who are the ultimate winners or losers.