The possibilities are endless for a society that values parenting more, takes a child-centred approach to work-family balance and stops its narrow thinking about childcare.

This society doesn't actually value children or care about what children need. DoCs workers are understaffed and children are best when they are quiet and ignored.
It likes workers. It likes mothers becaue they stay at home and take care of children quietly and cheaply, but bring children into the forefront of the argument, then forget it. This morning, Peter Costello has refused to change the current childcare arrangements. We have been having this argument for generations.

While an improved perception of parenting may be interesting, a far more important (and deeply seated) problem is our desire to abdicate responsibility for child care and leave it all on the governments door step.

Good quality child care is necessary to facilitate the societal needs of parents to address their own adult needs. I personally find it maddening to sit in a neighborhood park watching my children play while listening to the mindless prattle of mothers discussing the virtues of cloth vs paper nappies. I am perfectly willing to pay a very dear price for 1st class child care to 1) free me from the mindless daily grind and 2) provide early learning experiences for my child that I (nor most stay at home mothers) can deliver.

My child was in an excellent day care centre from 16 weeks of age. I could visit him during lunch hour and my wife could breast feed him during her work breaks. We had to put his name on a reservation list when we first found out she was pregnant.

During the years he spent at this centre he learned about conflict resolution (which he is very good at today), honesty and sportsmanship. A lot of time was spent with the children teaching them social skills such as good table manners, talking to adults, and correct social behavior.

We did not rely on any governmental help for our child - we found the day care best suited for him, we reviewed day care curriculums, we reviewed day care workers qualifications. We did the same for all of his schooling. As a result our child has excelled. He just recently turned 18 and today is in Washington DC as a finalist for an Intel university scholarship of US$100,000.

So, quit whining about what the government is not doing for you and take responsibility for yourself and your children.
The good centres are out there and they are not waiting for government help because concerned and responsible parents will pay the price.

"concerned and responsible parents will pay the price"

And their children who never get to see them will pay the rest of the price later on, because their parents are always too busy working.

My son attends kindergarten/child care as well but we have the lucky option that if he doesn't feel like going, he doesn't have to. He has used this option very seldom, but is a happier boy for knowing that it's there. Other kids at his kindy don't have that option and suffer terribly from it; only the other day my wife got him to befriend a boy who was "dumped" brutally by his ignorant father (you know how the childcare workers tell you to make the swift departure) and was sobbing uncontrollably afterwards (child abuse, in my opinion), so she spent time with the boy talking to him and getting my son to play with him. When she came to pick up my son, she also got a big smile from said dumped boy.

The child care situation in Australia needs a serious review.

And Bruce, your penultimate comment: "As a result our child has excelled. He just recently turned 18 and today is in Washington DC as a finalist for an Intel university scholarship of US$100,000."

According to whose criteria has your son excelled? Is it what HE really wants? While I obviously can't comment on the situation and it's possible he is genuinely happy, it sounds very much to me like you now have something to brag about to your colleagues. He's started on the social ladder at last ...

suki,
Society could do this, but being Australian society, there would need to be a dollar in it for someone, our child care workers are among the lowest paid workers in the nation, for doing one of the nation's most important jobs, how on Earth can we reconsile these two points.

Parenting, the most important role anyone can play, has no guidelines, information, or courses available to those who work. We all work so hard to pay for the expense of education, that we sacrifice the relationship we should have with our children, as the economy is geared to a double income family. Those of us who fall by the wayside in the employment stakes, are flat out surviving, let alone living. This of course affects the children as well as the parents, the only thing in site is a swelling of our ranks, under the Workchoices legislation.

Yet more Santa Claus stories with no analysis of the cost. Before telling us we need more X, Y, & Z, why not say how much it costs, and how those costs might be payed. In this case, I'd like to know

1) How much it will cost to get well paid tertiary qualified staff, and where I might find them given they don't exist at present ?

2) If males are to spend more time looking after children, then you need to tell us how you might compensate for the lower work force participation rates which that inevitably leads to. Perhaps you could pay for that with lower overall lower wages, higher unemployment and all the other things that lower productivity brings. More worrying would be if many of the professions now in shortage all decide they want to take more time off also. Where are you going to find, say, the extra doctors if the doctors currently extant only now work 90% of what they used to ?

Everyone can say "more of this that and the next thing" -- politicians do all the time. It would be a much wiser comment if you could actually tell us what the real trade-off is as well. Perhaps it is worth the trade-off, but it just isn't possible to tell with the current information.

I'm with Bruce on this one - at a conceptual level anyway.

We are rapidly approaching a point where we naturally assume that for every perceived problem there is an answer, and that the answer needs to come from outside ourselves.

"Somebody should do something about it", or more typically "the government should do something about it", have become the knee-jerk response to everything from kids wandering onto railway lines to internet porn. We have moved so far away from the concept of individual responsibility - and by extension, group responsibility - that it is difficult to imagine how we are ever going to get it back.

The more we sit back and wait for politicians to address the issues, the more we will become beholden to them for answers, and the more we will actually dislike the answers we receive. Because every politician understands that as we cede control over our lives to them, they gain that much more power over us, and will use that power to support and maintain their own existence.

This is not a discussion on the provision of childcare facilities, or the provision of "well paid tertiary qualified staff", or even "the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services." It is about what we as individuals and as a society want for ourselves. And if we are sufficiently selfish and shortsighted, we will ensure that our children will live with the consequences for a long time.

It is our choice, and no amount of standing committees will change that.