<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/quebec-universal-childcare-us-learn>
"When asked how much she pays for childcare, Leah Freeman chuckles and says she
isn’t sure. “It’s like C$93 (about $67) every two weeks or something. I barely
see it leaving my bank account,” she said.
To most parents in the US, where the average cost of childcare is $1,000 per
month and can reach more than $2,000 a month in some states, the idea of paying
so little sounds impossible. But it’s happening – north of the US border in
Quebec, Canada, where Freeman’s three-year-old daughter, Grace, attends a
subsidized early childhood education center (centres de la petite enfance,
known by its acronym CPE), for C$9.35, or less than $7 a day.
As soon as she found out that she was pregnant, Freeman, a social worker,
placed her daughter on a handful of waiting lists through a government website.
Now she can drop her daughter off for up to 10 hours a day, between 6am and
6pm, five days a week, all year round. In addition to childcare, Grace sees a
speech therapist at the CPE. A daily menu of the home-cooked meals and snacks
is posted at the building’s entrance every morning; meals are on a monthly
rotation with seasonal changes and locally sourced produce when available.
All this is possible because in 1997, Quebec lawmakers enacted a universal
childcare program as part of an effort to give equal opportunities to all
children – especially kids from low-income families – to get young mothers back
to work and to increase the government’s tax revenue and eliminate the
province’s budget deficit.
The massively popular program has been a win for everyone involved: it offers
high-quality early education to toddlers; good, unionized jobs to childcare
workers; has helped close the gender pay gap; affords young families crucial
support in the earliest years of their children’s lives and has been a
financial boon to the government. It’s been so popular that now the model is
being built up across the rest of Canada.
Perhaps ironically, Quebec’s approach was partly inspired by the groundbreaking
research into early childhood coming out of the US – that providing
high-quality education early on was not just socially good but a smart economic
investment.
“The best way to reduce social inequalities is to invest in small children very
early in their lives,” said Nathalie Bigras, a retired professor at Université
du Québec à Montréal who spent her career researching Quebec’s childcare. “And
this is something that you [Americans] told us.”
Now, as the US faces its own growing childcare crisis – an unaffordable
patchwork of care that varies wildly in quality and accessibility – what can it
learn from Quebec? Plenty, experts say."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-memory-choirs/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
