Across Australia, families with young children are under relentless pressure – financially, logistically, emotionally.
Need proof? Refer to the thousands of ferocious comments left under a recent ABC Instagram post inviting mums to share their “tips” for managing the juggle. The implication that work and raising children would be a breeze with the right hack was a red rag to a group of utterly exhausted and increasingly angry Australians.
These parents, like the 80,000+ parents I’m accountable to, aren’t asking for handouts. They’re asking for recognition that raising children without tipping into financial precarity or total burnout has become a luxury. Many feel as though they’re failing; the truth is, the system is failing them.
In this economic climate, with crushing cost of living and a plummeting birth rate, supporting families in the early years is not a “nice to have”. It is core economic and social infrastructure. The problem isn’t parents. It’s the architecture. We’ve built a modern society and left out the plumbing. The fixes aren’t personal. They’re structural. Four things, specifically.
Twelve months’ paid parental leave, shared between parents, at a replacement wage rate, should be the baseline. It’s the time families need to recover, bond and navigate one of life’s most profound transitions. Australia has made progress, but lags global peers. Countries that understand this don’t debate it. They fund it.
Second, quality, affordable and accessible early childhood education and care (ECEC).
Around 82 per cent of working families rely on it, not as a lifestyle choice, but as the non-negotiable foundation that makes work, income and family life possible. But for many, accessing it is a nightmare. No spots. Children turned away. Fees that rival a second mortgage. Quality that varies by postcode. Whether you can get early education you trust and afford is a lottery. Few families win.
And now parents are being told too much of it is bad for their children. A government-commissioned study, the First Five Years project, concludes childcare above 40 hours a week is associated with less positive social and emotional outcomes. It’s worth taking seriously. The average child in Australia attends 34 hours a week.
The same study found ECEC has a significant positive effect on cognitive development — the language and knowledge skills that directly predict school performance. The impact is most positive for services that meet or exceed quality standards. Children who attend no ECEC are twice as likely to start school developmentally vulnerable.
There’s some critical context here: this research captures data from the early days of the National Quality Framework. In 2015, 33 per cent of services didn’t meet quality standards. That number is now around 10 per cent. The system being measured is not the system that exists today.
Children under three need two things: developmental stimulation and a secure, stable home environment. Quality early education delivers the first in ways informal care typically cannot. The relevant comparison is never between quality early education and an ideal home – it is between quality early education and the actual alternatives available to families under financial pressure.
Quality ECEC protects the second thing, too. Financial stress and poverty undermine parental mental health and expose children to toxic stress at the moment they’re most vulnerable.
The lesson: quality is decisive, poverty is the biggest threat, and families are caught between a system too expensive to make work and too inconsistent to rely on. Fix the cost so parents can achieve financial security. Fix the quality so that when children are there, they thrive. Both things are possible. Neither is happening fast enough.
Third, quality outside-school-hours care, available as the rule rather than the exception, is not an add-on. It’s essential.
The school day ends at 3pm. The working day doesn’t. Annual leave is four weeks. School holidays are 12. The maths has never worked, and families, overwhelmingly mums, absorb the difference with considerable stress.
Fourth, workplaces that treat parenting as normal, not inconvenient. Pregnancy discrimination remains rife. Flexibility is still treated as a perk. Too many parents face impossible trade-offs that fall disproportionately on women and entrench inequity across a lifetime.
These reforms are the plumbing and wiring of modern family life — not optional extras bolted on after the fact, but the infrastructure on which the whole thing depends. Families “doing it tough” is not an unchangeable fact of Australian life. It is the result of policy choices, and it can be changed by better ones.
Georgie Dent is CEO of The Parenthood, a leading parenting advocacy organisation.
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Georgie Dent is CEO of The Parenthood, a leading parenting advocacy organisation.From our partners
