Active History

A mother drops off her two children at a day nursery in the 1940s. Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 3196950.

By Alison Norman and Lisa Pasolli

How much does it cost to raise a child? Should the costs of child care be considered a standard expense for Canadian families? Those questions are on a lot of minds lately, thanks to a storm of controversy around the Fraser Institute’s report The Cost of Raising Children. The report’s author, economics professor Christopher Sarlo, suggests that raising a child costs only $3,000 to $4,500 per year. Parents, policy analysts, and, and labour unions — to name a few — beg to differ. These critics highlight Sarlo’s crucial omission: child care expenses. Sarlo considers this a “discretionary” expense, not one that figures into basic minimums for most families. But families who need child care are hardly an exception; 77% of Canadian mothers with children under 5 are in the labour force. Furthermore, the report obscures the fact that quality, affordable child care spaces are so hard to come by that many parents end up relying on unregulated and sometimes unsafe care.

While it may be tempting to dismiss Sarlo’s calculations and his professed anti-social welfare slant, it’s also worth noting that the report is part of a growing public conversation about child care. British Columbia’s May election highlighted the growing momentum around a $10-a-day plan for universal care, in a province where monthly day care costs can reach $1400. An attention-grabbling New Republic article brought to light “The Hell of American Day Care”, sparking Canadian comparisons. Ontario continues to work out the kinks in its implementation of full-day kindergarten.

This is also a problem that likely strikes close to home for those of us in academia. The lack of day care services was a serious concern at the 2013 Congress in Victoria. Beyond the conference circuit, though, balancing work and family responsibilities is particularly challenging for early career academics. In 2008 Alison Norman conducted a survey of graduate student members of the Canadian Historical Association, and found that the majority of respondents were putting off having children until they finished their degrees — with the expectation that they would find jobs that would provide parental leave benefits and a salary that could cover the costs of child care. The realities of an uncertain and tenuous job market, though, has meant that many academic parents, mothers especially, have scrambled to find enough work to qualify for EI and to be able to afford day care.

Of course, none of this recent attention to child care is new. Calls for reform have been on the national agenda since at least 1970, when the Royal Commission on the Status of Women insisted on the need for a national day care program. Continue reading →