Daycare Demands Diversity

By Andrea Mrozek with Steven Lehrer

March 20, 2018

In conversation with Cardus Family program director Andrea Mrozek, Queen’s University economist Steven Lehrer says hard data debunks the political appeal of universal, uniform daycare

I got interested in universal child care when Michael Baker came to Queen’s and presented his joint work with Kevin Milligan and Jon Gruber, which found that the Quebec childcare program, the access to universal, subsidized child care there, led to declines in a host of child developmental outcomes as well as family outcomes In fact, in the paper that Mike Kottelenberg and I just had published last year in the Journal of Labour Economics, we actually can explain this heterogeneity because we are finding there are large gains to universal child care for kids in the lower part of the distribution from single parent households, but for most kids in the middle of the distribution from two-parent families, we are getting these negative declines It’s that if you are going to go into child care policy, you either have to target it appropriately or you are going to have to invest so much to ensure it’s high quality There’s other work, not by us, but also by psychologists like Christa Japel and Richard Tremblay that have shown the quality of these childcare centres is not that high He’s perhaps unfamiliar with the research about the effects of daycare on children and families, but he can’t be unfamiliar with the concept of good childcare being expensive What we found is that the kids who really had very low home inputs before hand, when they go to childcare, they are actually gaining because they are getting more inputs from child care than they would have otherwise had at home

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