Warner – economic benefits

The economic rationale for investing in early child development stems from a number of factors and we like to think of child care, early care and education, as having a three-part impact on the economy. The first and most important impact is the impact on children’s development: their social, emotional and cognitive development which makes them ready for school and then develops them to be more productive members of the work force later in life. And there’s been a fair amount of research, particularly in the US looking at longitudinal studies that shows very high economic returns for investments in early care and education. That is sort of one-third of the picture; a very important piece.  

The second economic rationale for investing in children, in early care and education, is the impact it has on parents. And parents’ labour force mobilization, the career choices and career ladders, particularly for women. And in a time of labour shortage there’s a lot of interest in the business community on how to motivate and maintain, particularly women in the labour force as they become mothers. It’s also important for fathers but the particular issue we’ve been seeing  in the US lately, in the last four or five years, is a slight ticking downwards in women’s labour force participation after they have children and this is in part due to the inadequate social infrastructure of child care. So that’s the second, and also very important reason, business case, for investing in early care and education.  

The third reason, and the one that I focus on mostly in my research is the perspective, from the perspective of the region and the regional economy. And child care as it turns out, is a critical social infrastructure for economic development. And we’ve always considered physical infrastructures like roads and bridges and water and sewer lines as being important for economic development but we’ve ignored child care. And the business community is now keenly aware, because of problems with labour shortage and problems with retention of employees, that child care is an infrastructure. It’s not something that business wants to have to provide itself. It wants it to be provided as part of the infrastructure that’s provided at the community or the regional level.  

So we’ve taken, in our work, we’ve taken the trillium flower as an example of these three pieces: the children’s…the child development piece, the parent piece, and the regional economic piece. And you really need to think about all three together, in the whole picture.