We have K on 9 waiting lists for day care. Of those, 3 will take infants. 1 will take children 15 months or more. The rest will only take children 18 months or older.
Wouldn't it be great if parental leave was for 18 months?! Then all of us parents who are returning to work when our benefits end wouldn't have to compete for the extremely rare infant spaces in daycare. At 18 months, daycares can take more children with fewer staff. Which is why there are limited infant spaces, it just doesn't make as much financial sense to provide them.
An 18 month leave would allow parents more time to get their children off to a good start developmentally. It would allow daycares to maximize the number of children they take per staff. Plus it wouldn't really cost the goverment much more. I mean, we're all paying into the EI pot and most of us aren't taking back out of it. The regulations around collecting EI are so strict that we generally end up with a surplus of funds which the government is not supposed to use for other purposes (but do anyway). So why not extend parental leaves? Some of the European countries have much longer leaves than we have already. I think this is a great plan!
