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+1. Family Structure Change+
Over the past 15 years, the number of women who entered the labour force nearly doubled and the greatest increase in the labour force participation is among women with pre-school age children.
2. Education/Employment Participation
Parents are unable to participate in employment or training because of lack of access to adequate child care. In addition, child care is a necessary ingredient in securing equality for women. Women can not achieve equality without workforce equality.
3. Unregulated Child Care
Parent live and work with anxiety about unreliable and potentially unsafe child care arrangements. This has a negative impact on their work performance.
4. Investment in the Future
An investment in Early Childhood Education promotes language development, social skills, cognitive abilities and enhances school performance. These are the building blocks for later, life-long learning.
5. Quality of Care
High quality child care provides young children with a secure, enriching daily environment and helps to alleviate the effects of poverty, including poor school performance and early high school drop-outs.
6. Special Needs
Children in rural areas have specific needs for child care. The current financial crisis facing farm families has created the need for both parents to work on or off the farm. With their children on the job site, the potential for serious injury or death is particularly high during peak seasons.
Integrated child care environments are effective for children who are physically or developmentally disabled, and provide a support to the families.
7. Quality of Life
Appropriate child care, and support for parents, improve family life and health. Most of all children benefit from relationships with qualified committed child care staff.
8. Community Traditions and Values
For aboriginal people, child care can be an opportunity for passing on community traditions and values. Refugee and immigrant children benefit through an introduction to Canadian life while maintaining contact with their culture of origin through culturally sensitive and anti-racist child care programs.
9. Employment Standards
Trained Early Childhood Educators who are adequately compensated for their education and the valuable work they do, are committed to child care. This results in lower staff turnover and burnout, and provides more stability and higher quality of care for the children.
10. Benefits to Community and Society
The broader community and society is a beneficiary of high quality child care. Child care is a solid investment from several perspectives:
- reduces the need for reliance on social assistance and allows work force participation;
- enables parents to contribute to the economy by entering the labour force or taking part in job training and education;
- enables teenage mothers to return to school;
- decreases absenteeism in the workplace and increases productivity;
- reduces public expenditure on healthcare in long-term;
- is resource to families and community;
- saves tax dollars - a single dollar invested in quality care and education in the early years can save society seven dollars in future correction costs.