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Korea has recently been horrified by a spate of CCTV footages that show child care providers punch, slap, and hit small children left in their care.
As is wont in these cases, there is a social outrage followed by collective handwringing about what's wrong with Korean society that allows such crimes to happen. Most of the outrage seems to be aimed at the individual childcare providers who were caught abusing the children, which is only right. These perpetrators should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Nothing can excuse the horrific behavior against helpless children who were entrusted to their care.
Undoubtedly, the government will soon announce a package of reactive solutions that will address many of the problems that have already been pointed out, including more stringent training and certification program for childcare providers and mandating CCTV installation at all childcare centers.
Oh, one more. How could I forget? As one lawmaker suggested, hire grandmothers to make morning and afternoon visits to childcare centers to check on the children. It's more humane than installing CCTV, and grandmothers bring that special brand of love that no one else can imitate. And it will create higher employment for the senior citizen demographics as well.
As silly as his solution sounds, it's actually closer to hitting the nail on the head on what the real problem is. It's not lack of proper oversight over childcare centers, prevalence of providers with anger management issues, or too few CCTVs that are resulting in the sudden uptick in childcare abuses. The real problem is that Moms (or grandmothers, the traditional alternative for childcare) are not raising their own children. More accurately, the government is actually discouraging Moms from raising their own children through a specific set of policies.
It's rather a simple case of economics, really. In order to encourage women to have more children, the central government provides subsidies for each kid that you have. For each newborn up to one year old, the government will pay a mom 200,000 won per month. For a child between one and two, the subsidy amount decreases to 150,000 won. For a child between two and five years old, the subsidy decreases to 100,000 won.
However, the same child will fetch 755,000 won if you send him or her to a childcare facility up to one year old. Between one and, he will be worth 521,000 won. Between two and three, the amount is 410,000 won. From three till five years old, he will bring in 220,000 won every month. Just doing a back of the envelope type of calculation, this means that a mom who raises her own child will lose over 19 million won over five years.
And we are only talking cash. Being a mom is probably the hardest job that anyone could ever have; it's a non-stop 24X7 job without a break. By taking your child to a childcare center, the mom will also be save herself from all the inevitable wear and tear of raising a child and get much more cash to boot, along with some guaranteed time for herself. You would be foolish not to put your child in childcare.
Where are the Moms? Not with their children because the government penalizes them raising their kids but rewards them for sending them to childcare.
No wonder that demand for childcare has skyrocketed. In some neighborhoods, the wait is up to seven or eight months to get a spot in the local childcare centers. This also creates a dynamic in which the childcare centers hold the power in the relationship since Moms' money and time (basically quality of life) is directly dependent on them getting their children placed in childcare centers. It's difficult to hold childcare center owners accountable when Moms are in the weaker position. Their position becomes even weaker for Moms in a two-income household when finding childcare becomes a matter of being able to go to work.
Talking about unintended consequences. I am sure that the policymakers had good intentions when drafting the policy. They probably thought that they were enabling working moms to raise children while also pursuing their careers. But by discriminating against stay-at-home mothers, they created an incentive paradigm that has directly led to today's problems. In other words, this is an artificial construct that the government has created with its policies.
And I am not even talking about other non-quantifiable consequences, such as the future social costs of children raised in oftentimes impersonal environments by overworked childcare providers working in profit-driven commercial entities? Even without the outright abuses, such environments cannot be good for developing children during the times when they most need loving, attentive care. And these children will inevitably impose some type of costs on society in the future.
This is a classic case of well-intentioned public policy gone awry because it wasn't thought through. Which also leaves me to wonder: how many moms were consulted when writing this policy? Not enough, I bet.
Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.
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