Working Parents

It's so much easier for government officials to thump their chests about how much they worry about the welfare of the working parents' children than to actually do something about it. There is a series of very obvious measures that the government and companies or universities could undertake that would be helpful and beneficial to everybody.

For example: why not establish on-site daycare facilities in workplaces? The expense would be minimal and the benefits huge. Parents could spend more time with their children, they will concentrate all the better on their work if they can go see that the kid is ok at any point. Employees with children would not try to leave the workplace at 5 p.m. on the dot because they have to get to daycare before it closes. And the government could offer significant tax breaks to companies who do this. If it's true that, as Alberta's Finance Minister claims, children benefit so much from being close to their parents, why isn't she doing anything to promote such measures?

Another set of important measures (also pretty cheap and easy to introduce into the workplace) as proposed by my reader mom of seven: "Better working conditions for nursing mothers, including pumping breaks and pumping rooms. Better maternity leaves to allow them to get breastfeeding well established before they have to return to work. Getting insurance companies to cover things like good quality breastpumps that would allow moms to work AND BREASTFEED." Sounds great, so why isn't anyhting being done about this? Why is it accepted as gospel truth that the only way to rear children is to stick women in the home? The government could reward companies who adopt such measures with tax breaks if it wanted to do something productive for a change..