| "Cash for care" was a compromise forced through by the Christian Democrats to attempt to roll back long standing daycare policies, but it only ever applied to one and eventually two year olds, and was rolled back heavily as soon as that government fell after one decade. The majority of the last half century has been characterised by steady expansion of daycare, just like in Sweden. > that was used by 91% of citizens? That is a ridiculous exaggeration by omission, given that daycare takeup for the covered group consistently remained relatively fixed, reflecting that in most cases it changed parents behaviour very little. In 2000, two years after that policy was introduced, 37.1% of the eligible age group was in daycare, by 2005, a majority of the eligible group were in daycare. By the time it was removed for 2 year olds, the number was 78.1%, and today >85% of the originally covered group is in daycare. This steady growth in takeup has closely followed the overall increase in takeup of daycare. Overall the long term percentage takeup of daycare in Norway has gone up year over year nearly every year since the mid 70's, just like in Sweden, the exception being with lowering of school starting age. Today, 93.4% children between 1 (after majority of parental leave is over; some extends past one year and so contributes to pulling the 93.4% number down) and 5 go to daycare in Norway according to Statistics Norway. So the point remains: If it was Sweden's use of day care that has supposedly led to these supposed problems, you'd expect to see the same issues in Norway (half the references were 404's or had no links and no full titles of papers, so I'm see little reason to trust that they've not been equally selective in their treatment of their sources as their convenient failure to address this). |