One thing strikes me these days when I cross a park for small children: the large number of men who accompany them (most often their fathers, one might suppose) if you come there at the end of the day or during the weekend, and the practically complete absence of educators when you come across a group of daycare children during a weekday.
The government recently announced that financial incentives were henceforth offered in order to convince approximately 20,000 new educators to join the daycare network over the next few years. Has the question of finding the means to also bring a certain number of young boys to choose this profession arise? And even to redirect a certain number of male adults there who would like to take care of young children who are not their own, and that, full time, not just on weekends?
In recent decades, measures that encourage fathers to spend more time with their young children have been put in place. This came from the fact that the parents demanded this sharing of time, for their own balance as adults, but also because they knew very well that their children would benefit from this increased presence of a “positive male role model” in their daily lives. . How is it that this logic does not succeed in prevailing in the day care network, where these same children spend two-thirds of their time?
I submit this question to the child care community itself as well as to the government, because it seems to me that the time is right to ask it at this time. A first opportunity to do so was missed some 20 years ago, when the daycare network was expanded. Here is a second, which it would be better not to miss, again for the benefit of thousands of young boys who are about to make their career choice, but also for the benefit of thousands of children who could benefit from their attendance at the daycare centers they attend.
I submit this question by adding that, in my opinion, the absence of men in day care centers (they currently constitute barely 4% of the staff, according to Ministry data) is not a question of salary. This current mode of settling everything through financial incentives does not work in the other networks, it will not work here either. Nor would it work to bring more women to construction sites, for that matter. Obviously, there are other factors that are quite more important that block the presence of men in daycare centers in Quebec. Factors that would not require a public commission to understand them! A simple verification of the factors that explain the current higher presence of men in Scandinavian daycare centers and the reasons why the first popular daycare centers in Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s were able to do better in this regard than those of recent years should suffice.