Early childcare and our limited choices

The reaction to Bishop Anton Teuma’s remarks on early childcare has been swift and emotionally charged. Yet, much of the criticism risks missing the wood for the trees.

At its core, the bishop’s intervention was not an attack on parents, working mothers or childcare professionals. It was a moral critique of a system that increasingly forces families into choices they would not freely make and then treats those choices as simply ‘the way things are’.

Christian social teaching begins from a simple anthropological claim: every human being is a person first, not a unit of production or consumption, and definitely not someone to be scheduled, moved, placed and managed so that everything else runs on time.

The bishop’s point is not that parents are neglectful when they use childcare. He is warning of a wider cultural drift in which the line between what families truly need and what they are pushed to want is blurred and moral priorities are reshaped without public debate or ethical scrutiny.

This concern is not uniquely religious. Developmental psychology has long shown that the first two years of life are a period of intense neurological and emotional formation. Secure attachment to the caregivers who are there most often, who know the baby best and respond most consistently over time, plays a measurable part in emotional regulation, resilience to stress and mental health.

The question, then, is whether we can really afford for those caregivers not to be the parents.

While high-quality childcare can mitigate some risks, it does not fully substitute sustained parental presence in early infancy. This is not ideology; it is mainstream developmental science.

The most important point is this: parents are not the problem. Policy design is. Malta’s current framework offers 18 weeks of maternity leave, followed almost immediately by economic pressure to return to full-time work. Free childcare  starting at the age of three months, while valuable, also embeds a clear policy expectation: early separation is expected, not exceptional. Families who resist this model often do so at significant financial cost.

In this context, ‘choice’ is an overstatement. Many families face the same squeeze: high housing costs, loan repayments and an expectation that both parents must work full-time. Under that pressure, childcare is not chosen because it is preferred but because it is what makes the month add up.

Early separation is effectively built into the way ordinary life is now being financed and organised. In other words, what is presented as a private decision is, in practice, a predictable outcome of financial pressures and labour-market expectations.

Every human being is a person first, not a unit of production or consumption- Ivan Cauchi

Economically, the benefits are real. Early childcare raises labour supply and supports GDP growth. However, this is a trade-off over time rather than a costless gain. It can amount to intertemporal cost-shifting, where costs are not removed but displaced into the future and into other parts of the system. These costs may remain statistically invisible for years, only to reappear later as higher parental stress and burnout, strain on family relationships and greater demand for remedial support in education and mental health.

What appears efficient in the short term may prove unsustainable over the life course.

Bishop Teuma’s language may have been stark but prophetic speech often is. He was in no way rejecting women’s economic independence. On the contrary, he was calling on policymakers to shape policies that genuinely support women and families. And the good news is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel: practical, family-friendly approaches are already in use elsewhere.

Countries with longer paid parental leave, such as Sweden and Norway, allow parents to remain at home for the first year or more without severing their link to the labour market. Female employment remains high, while parental stress is lower than in countries with shorter leave.

Flexible work in the Netherlands is not just an empty slogan but a standard option. Part-time and flexible hours are widely used across many professional roles, allowing parents to stay in work while adjusting their schedules around family life, rather than being forced to choose between full-time hours and stepping out altogether.

Shared caregiving has been normalised in places such as Iceland, where non-transferable parental leave for fathers has significantly increased paternal involvement in early childcare. The result has been more balanced caregiving and stronger family bonds.

Finally, countries such as Germany and Canada provide direct financial support or home-care allowances for families who choose to delay full-time institutional childcare. This recognises early care as socially valuable work, rather than treating it as lost productivity.

These examples show that supporting early family life does not weaken economies. It strengthens them by reducing stress, stabilising households and investing in human development from the very start.

The real issue, therefore, is not whether parents deserve judgement for doing what they must within the system they have been given. They do not. The real issue is whether our economic and social arrangements are adequately aligned with the needs of the children they are intended to serve.

Ivan Cauchi is a lecturer in economics and public policy. He also serves on the Justice and Peace Commission of the Archdiocese of Malta.