Time to focus on the family

The developmental impacts of quality childcare for children who have a deficient home environment are well known.

This fact is used by many universal childcare advocates as fertile ground to argue against the government’s new policy for activity-testing access to childcare benefits. The new policy includes a 24 hours per fortnight ‘safety net’ for disadvantaged children, and there is an additional subsidy for children who are at serious risk of abuse or neglect. However, it does represent a change from the status quo of being able to access 50 hours per fortnight of Child Care Benefit by passing a very lax activity test.

But is merely carving out a section of mainstream childcare and buttressing it with higher levels of subsidy really an effective means of ameliorating the negative lifetime effects of disadvantaged children, or is a more targeted and intensive intervention needed?

The purpose of early childhood interventions (ECIs) is to improve children’s cognitive, behavioural and socio-emotional functioning in an intensive setting, with the goal of having a lifetime positive impact on their wellbeing and reduce costs to society. They are often complemented by parenting interventions, which focus on parents to help improve the quality of parenting. The evidence from different ECIs ranges from highly effective with long-term impacts, to somewhat effective with a fadeout over childhood.

It is strange that for all the government’s talk of the McClure Welfare Review Taskforce and how it borrows from the New Zealand model (where lifetime risk of welfare dependence is quantified, and assistance and services are targeted early-on to high-risk people), early childhood interventions have been virtually ignored as being part of that solution. Small-scale ECIs and parenting interventions have been undertaken in Australia, largely by non-government organisations with some government involvement, but very little research has been done on how they can be used most effectively in this country.

It is exceedingly difficult for a uniformly-regulated childcare system to adequately service the needs of disadvantaged children and their families, while maintaining the overall goal of keeping childcare accessible for parents whose children simply need to be kept safe while they are at work.

Though my research has given me cause to be sceptical about the impacts of ‘high-quality’ childcare on middle-class children, I am cautiously optimistic about the life-changing potential that ECIs could offer to some of the most disadvantaged children in our communities.