of course feminist want children brainwashed from a young age. No amount of degrees, phds etc can compensate for the natural God given nuturing instincts of a mother. Shoving them into some communist child care centre gives the social engineers even more access to our most valuable assett (our children). No amount of tax payer funded propoganda can change the truth.

I know I will be pilloried for this but if a woman wants to have a child and cannot afford to pay for child care out of her own pocket then she should stay home for the first four or five years and bring up the child herself.
As soon as the child starts school, then the mother can go back to work.
This way the child is getting the proper care it needs in it's most formative years.
That is more important than working to pay off a house that it probably too big anyway.
If the mother has a great career and does not want to stop working then give up on the children.
as for *Abbott is doing the right thing by trying to get more women to have more babies* this is nonsense, there are too many people now without encouraging more for political purposes.

Er...you guys forget that our cosy consumer paradigm is predicated on consuming. As I've said before, if Mrs A pays Mrs B to look after her child then GDP goes up. If Mrs A looks after her own child, GDP stays the same.

Why blame "feminists" (aka women) solely for the Western industrial paradigm that encourages women to participate in the "workplace" at the earliest opportunity?

I don't know how many of you have had a child in the last fifteen years, but I did. We were in a position where I wasn't forced back into working outside of home. Nevertheless, the societal pressure on me to toss the child into childcare was palpable...and much more than when our daughter was an infant 19 years previously.

I was advised by all and sundry to put our son into childcare for socialisation, etc. These days a woman almost has to excuse herself if she chooses to look after her own infants full time.

Actually, I relented for nine months and we found a nice little childcare venue where he attended one day a week...that was until it was gobbled up by a big childcare enterprise, which in turn was gobbled up by an even bigger one (ABC) which closed down our little centre immediately. Nice one...childcare is very big business in the modern world.

As it turned out, it was great for us and we pulled Junior out and he never went back to childcare again.

Even though wages are blamed for child care costs, this is a real red herring. Wages are still low, so other factors are to blame for rising costs.

Such as gold plating, and the structure of the business, like one part will own the premises, then charge rent to the other part, then there is the shareholders bonuses, not to mention the CEO's bonuses.

It might be personality but I would not readily swap jobs with child care or nursing home carers for the same money as I get now.

The job's are from what I've seen of them a minefield of conflicting priorities and dealing with often unreasonable people (including some of those being cared for).

I've been annoyed by the gendered portrayal of the issue, as if its only mothers dealing with the rising prices of child care. No longer a current issue for me but out of hours care was a big expense for me for a number of years.

I don't have easy answers to the issue, I needed to make extensive use of out of hours care for my son during his primary years. Expensive enough as a non-deductable work related expense.

I do think recognised child care should be tax deductable where it is used during either work or work related commuting hours. Not much help to really low income earners I know, however there are a lot of others where it is a far more legitimate income related expense than a lot of what is allowed.

I don't have evidence to back the view but it looks to me like another area where government has intefered in the market to try andmake it more accessable for some and thats pushed prices up.

R0bert

Here's a link that may be of interest to those
that are prepared to read on issues from a variety of
sources rather than just those of NewsCorp Ltd:

http://newmatilda.com/2014/06/24/child-care-costs-grow-and-so-does-risk-abbott