Victoria Baranow and her husband, Wes Battersby, corral their children, Brixton, 8, Oliver, 5, and Alice, 2, after school and daycare in Hamilton, Ont.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Last December, Victoria Baranow was shopping at Ikea when her phone rang. It was the YMCA-run after-school program at her eight-year-old son’s school, finally offering him a spot after years on the wait list.
“I was in such shock, I started to cry,” says the Hamilton-based parent of three, who works as a project manager but is currently seeking a new role. “Looking for jobs and having the prospect of commuting several days a week and not having child care was a lot [to handle].”
Before getting the spot, Brixton had been coming home on the bus after school ends at 2:40 p.m. His younger siblings, Oliver, 5, and Alice, 2, go to two different daycares housed in the school that Oliver attends. When Oliver goes into Grade 1 next year, however, he’ll likely move to his big brother’s French Immersion school (there are complex rules around catchment in their area). But Ms. Baranow and her husband, Wes Battersby, don’t know if Oliver will get a spot in the YMCA program when he needs it, or whether Alice will when her time comes.
“I’m sorry, but is my child supposed to get from school to home and be unsupervised at home at age six? That’s insane,” Ms. Baranow says.
It’s complicated and frustrating, but an improvement over last year when only their toddler had a daycare spot. The older siblings were in two different schools with different end times. Ms. Baranow made it work as she was winding down a project, but if she had to commute into Toronto and her husband, an engineer, was working an hour’s drive away, that day was basically impossible.
New parents in Canada often struggle to find child care for their babies. But the school-aged care situation is just as fraught, or more so. After-care spots are difficult to secure, and before-care spaces are rarer still. It can be more expensive because federal funding – for the so-called $10-a-day program – often subsidizes infant and toddler spots only. One parent reports they pay $18 a day for their kids under four, and that jumps to $35 for kindergarten after-care. Quality can be an issue, too.
“School-aged care has not been getting the attention that preschool child care has,” says Morna Ballantyne, executive director of advocacy group Child Care Now. “This definitely has an impact on labour force participation of women.”
A neglected problem
According to 2023 statistics from the non-profit Childcare Resource and Research Unit, there were 830,000 regulated before- and after-school care spaces for children aged 4-12 in Canada. With few spaces in regulated programs taught by early childhood educators, families can scramble.
“As a parent, you can end up in a situation of desperation and put your child in programs and hope for the best. That’s not a good situation,” says Ms. Ballantyne.
A 2021 report by Statistics Canada found that 35 per cent of children aged four to 11 participated in some form of non-parental child care. Sixty per cent of those children were in a before- or after-school program, 22 per cent were with a relative, 16 per cent were in a private home with a non-relative and 12 per cent were in a daycare centre.
Before the 2019 federal election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged the creation of 250,000 formal before-and-after school spots for kids under 10, with parents charged lower rates.
“Then that just disappeared,” Ms. Ballantyne says. “After the pandemic, government policy shifted to the younger years.” (Trudeau recently announced $37-billion over five years to extend the federal child-care program until 2031, but there was no mention of school-aged spots.)
Acquaintances have suggested to Ms. Baranow that she could solve her problems by taking her kids out of care and pivoting her career, at least for a while. “I’m like, ‘No, I would lose my spot,’” she says. “I would never make the decision to be at stay-at-home mom, that’s not me.”
Tough choices for parents
Victoria Baranow, with her family at home, says that looking for jobs without after-care for her eldest child was challenging.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Sometimes, adjusting work is the only solution. Katie German’s five-year-old daughter has been on the wait list at her school’s care program for years, with no guidance on where she might find a spot elsewhere.
A private shuttle service could pick her daughter up at 3:15 p.m. and take her to a dance or martial arts program nearby, but Ms. German and her partner have balked at the double cost and the demands on their kid.
“Transitions are hard, and the idea that she’d have to get into a car with somebody she does not know well, it would take a lot,” says Ms. German, who lives in Oakville, Ont.
She recently turned down an executive director role at a non-profit, partly because of child care, taking a four-day-a-week role instead. She says she tends to be the “default” parent picking up her child at 3 p.m. each day because her partner’s job is more traditional.
To accommodate the pickups, Ms. German negotiated with her employer to work shorter hours for five days a week instead of four. “Even working at a place that has a positive culture for parents, I worry if I’m asking too much,” she says.
Allison Venditti, founder of Moms at Work, a community of working mothers that also offers coaching, sees the school-aged child-care gap as directly impacting women’s stress levels and opportunities for advancement.
“People are scrambling to piece together child care,” she says. “That’s the consistent theme: scrambling and piecemeal.”
More is not enough
Policies and funding to increase the number of regulated, school-aged child-care spots would make a difference for working women. That’s happening in places such as Manitoba, which earmarked funds in 2023 for more than 2,600 spaces for children under seven located in schools.
However, Ms. Ballantyne notes that not every province and territory has introduced full-day kindergarten for all children. “It shouldn’t be mandatory, but it should be a right for children at age four and five to attend full-day kindergarten programs in the public education system,” she says.
Carmina Ravanera, a senior research associate with the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, says it’s not just about having more care spots – they must be accessible. Wrap-around care right in schools is ideal, with easy-to-understand wait list and registration policies.
Care should also be appropriate for the kids receiving it. “The question of quality can be complex,” Ms. Ravanera says. “It’s something that’s hard to measure. There can be so many factors.” Does the care support those with additional needs? What happens as kids get older? “The needs of a nine-year-old are going to be different than the needs of a 12-year-old,” she adds.
How employers can help
Workplaces can do better to help mothers stay in their roles, no matter what child-care challenges they face. “Organizations can allow and facilitate flexible work and understand that parents have these needs,” says Ms. Ravanera.
Ms. Venditti would like to see outdated attitudes about work and family die off. Supporting women who are facing child-care challenges is the right thing to do, she says, plus those old attitudes are costing companies money.
“If you’ve invested in making [women] managers [and] they are leaving mid-career, it’s hard to replace them,” she says, noting that some progressive companies offer on-site daycares or open offices closer to where their teams live.
Workdays and school days were designed in a different era for different needs, but that does not mean they cannot change to better support modern families. While some women have extra resources – like family members who will help in a pinch – many are just a wait-list disaster or pickup snafu away from sacrificing their careers.
“Having good child care into the school age is super important for helping women have the option to stay in their jobs and to contribute to the economy,” says Ms. Ravanera. “It’s probably one of the biggest factors in women not advancing in careers and not getting ahead at work.”
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