Govt must enhance support to parents

David Wong welcomes kindergarten subsidy but points out there is precious little help for parents of infants and toddlers in Hong Kong

Education policy has always been a high priority for the government and the Education Bureau has the largest budget among all government bureaus. Lately the issue of standardized testing for primary school students - the Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA) and Basic Competency Assessments (BCA) - has attracted a lot of media attention. Certainly it is important for children to have a happy and effective learning environment and forcing students to excessively prepare for standardized tests is not useful to say the least. It would be wise for the next administration to suspend the tests pending a proper and thorough review.

Surely, children's education goes far beyond standardized testing. The government has been providing nine years of free and compulsory education for all children above the age of 6. This will be gradually expanded to 12 years. Recently, the government has begun to subsidize kindergartens and offer free half-day school placements to pupils. These were all encouraging but the government has provided little support to parents of children below the age of 3.

Hong Kong has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, which is among the main reasons for our growing aging population. Overseas experience has shown that it is extremely difficult to increase birth rates in advanced economies like Hong Kong's but it should be noted that governments around the world are increasing support to parents and children in an effort to boost declining birth rates. These policies usually involve four areas: Maternity leave, child day-care services, kindergarten tuition and support for working mothers. Needless to say there is much room for improvement on all these areas in Hong Kong.

Expectant mothers currently enjoy 10 weeks of paid maternity leave and fathers have three days. It is unrealistic to expect maternity leave to be significantly increased to about a year to match that in some other developed economies. I personally believe that it should be extended to three months after birth for the mothers and two weeks for the fathers. The reason is that it usually takes about three months for parents to stop having to feed infants in the middle of the night and let mothers have better rest before working again. Mothers who have just delivered are exhausted and should not be expected to care for the infant alone immediately. It would be beneficial to encourage fathers to take care of both the mother and infant for at least the first two weeks. Understandably, small and medium enterprises may feel they could not afford to pay for longer maternity leaves. Therefore, the government should step in to provide direct subsidy to expectant parents to compensate for at least part of the lost wages.

Another problem new parents have to face is lack of day-care services. Currently, there is almost no company or non-government organization providing day-care services for new-born babies. For the precious few that do, the waiting list is prohibitively long. Therefore, parents either have to quit work, leave babies with grandparents or hire a foreign domestic helper. Not all families are fortunate to have willing and able grandparents to take care of babies. As a result, studies have shown that about a third of all local babies are being raised by foreign domestic helpers. It would be better for children's development if there were affordable and professionally run day-care centers that expedite child development. Obviously, taking care of infants is an expensive and heavy responsibility for any organization. The government would have to standardize their quality, provide land for premises and subsidize the high costs, which is no mean feat.

The new government subsidy for half-day kindergarten is extremely helpful to parents. Nonetheless, it should be noted that in addition to education, schools also serve as child-care centers for working parents. Since full-day primary and secondary schools are provided free of charge, there is every reason for full-day kindergartens to be free as well. I understand that not all parents would like their children to attend full-day kindergartens but the government should provide that option. Unlike primary and secondary schools, no specific land is allocated to kindergartens in new development areas. As a result, many kindergartens have to pay high market rents and may be evicted by landlords. Since the government has now begun to provide a subsidy, the relevant zoning requirements should be updated.

Consequently, providing better support to parents and infants is not easy and requires a lot of additional public resources. However, for the sake of our future generations, it is high time for the government to at least begin taking baby steps in the right direction.

(HK Edition 06/05/2017 page9)