Author: Brian C. Robertson
Year of Publication: 2003
Page Count: 222
In 2021, as Canada’s federal government promised $9.2 billion in annual spending on child care programs, Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Families, Children, and Social Development, was quoted as saying: “Child care is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. The past year has made it abundantly clear that we need affordable, accessible, inclusive, and high-quality child care, and we need it now. Leaders in the private, social, and labour sectors all agree that a Canada-wide early learning and child care system will drive economic growth, help women get back into the workforce, and give every child across Canada the best start in life. Together, I know we can get this done.”
In his book Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn’t Telling Us (2003, 222 pages), Brian C. Robertson explains the forces that are at work behind the decades-long push for universal, government-subsidized child care, and why this movement is so destructive to families and society in general. Robertson describes the coalition of interests that are hard at work promoting the institutionalized care of children, and what their motivation is. He argues that the impetus behind the universal day-care movement comes from corporations (which serve to benefit from having more women in the workforce), governments (which benefit politically and also financially via the taxes paid by working mothers and growth in GDP), social scientists (whose ideology devalues the importance of stay-at-home moms and the “traditional” family structure), the day-care industry, and professionals in all of these fields who are seeking to justify their own choice to subject their children to institutionalized care. Forces which emphasize economics have united with ideologues to pressure women to enter the workforce and “contract out” the care of their children, and, Robertson argues, the resulting trends have been disastrous.
Day Care Deception presents a detailed, well-supported case for abandoning the “social experiment” that has brought so many mothers into the workforce at the expense of their children’s well-being. While the book is somewhat repetitive and could have benefited from some judicious editing, it is a valuable resource that I wholeheartedly recommend.