영아기 양육지원 정책 체계화 방안 연구

Abstract

As the support for households which bring up an infant is increasing recently, there is a growing concerning about the consistency of such support with applicable support system and a greater interest in the change of demands for infant-rearing support policy for those households. Therefore, systemization is necessary to identify various supports for infant-rearing families quickly and to provide the subjects with adequate and effective supports to meet their needs. The current study attempts to suggest the improvement of child care system, or a method to systemize such system by analyzing the governmental supports for infant-rearing families in each key category and by identifying areas which show inconsistency between the objectives of individual system or areas where supports are overlapped or missing, the purpose of which is to make sure that people on the demand side can be guaranteed a variety of options depending on their needs and receive effective support. As the key methodology, this study has performed literature review, a fact-finding survey of infant-caring parents and FGI, and an expert survey, and has held a policy seminar. The fact-finding survey of infant-caring parents was carried out on 1,000 parents who raise an infant aged 0~2 years. The expert survey was carried out on a total of 40 preceding researchers in the areas of childcare policy for infants and toddlers in order to collect their opinions about the direction and method to systemize childcare support policy. The results of the current study are as follows. First, this study has confirmed through the investigation of the national plans at the central government-level (such as the Basic Plan for Low Fertility and Ageing Society, etc.) that the country’s childcare support policies for infants and toddlers and its policy directions have been changed depending on the change of the government regime or other milestone event. The earlier childcare support policies were focused on the improvement of the policies to support the mothers‘ economic activities and thus the majority of policies took the form of childcare cost support. However, the policies have been expanded to ‘cash support’ and ‘time support’ to assist the families’ own childrearing as the appropriateness of ‘childrearing in the family’ was being emphasized. After 2019, guarantee of income and cash support for infant-rearing families were reinforced, and in 2023 the policy is being directed toward comprehensive supports for applicable families with the introduction of ‘parent benefit’. Second, in Korea, the childcare support policies and support programs specialized for ‘infants’, excluding toddlers, are usually focused on the supports available to the families if they choose the option of ‘childrearing in the family’, while the purposes of individual supports, especially in the category of ‘service’ and ‘time’, tend to be inconsistent. It appears that due to the basic tone of ‘expanding’ the supports in all areas, there arise confusion in the goals of the policies. Third, the infant-care support policies of other countries, in particular Japan, France, and Sweden, show the different directions depending on the country’s own political, social and cultural conditions and needs. In Japan, the supports have been expanded and developed focusing on childcare policies to support women’s economic activity and to solve the issue of low fertility. In France, due to their strong family culture, a variety of options are offered for childcare in family rather from the perspective of family support policy. Especially, France seems to have developed the supports by meticulously reflecting different needs and demands of individual families for childcare supports in the cash support category, such as the needs depending on the number of child, income level, or single family household. In the case of Sweden, their policy has been developed from multidirectional family policy perspectives which consider all related aspects, including population policy, social justice, and talent development in terms of the efficiency of national development, and gender equality. Characteristically, the policy is especially related to the development course of ‘gender equality’ more closely. Fourth, the survey on the infant-rearing parents has revealed that the main caregivers of infants are ‘child care/day care center(45.4%)’ and ‘mother(43.3%)’, and 53.5% of the households in which both parents are working use a day care center. The average time of using a day care center is seven hours and 24 minutes, and 44.1% use extended hours, showing the high demands for a long-time day care center service. In the case of households in which mothers have long but regular working hours, extended hours of childcare service would be more convenient. Fifth, the infant-rearing families actually send their child approximately seven months earlier than the time they wish to do so. This study has found that such phenomenon is due to their concern that they might not be able to use the day care center at the time of their expectation. Sixth, the study has revealed that the main difficulties in infant-rearing are physical and mental burden, and childcare costs. Among the families in which both families are working, ‘holding down a job and rearing a child’ is also pointed out as a main difficulty, and the rate of career disadvantage experienced by the mothers due to childcare is remarkably higher as 44.5% than that of fathers as 9.5%. The majority of sources where the infant-rearing parents get the information about childcare support policies are local online communities for mothers, blogs and other similar SNS platforms. In respect to getting the childcare support information, most interviewees have answered that having to search for each information separately by different support program of the government is the most challenging part, and many have mentioned the necessity of ‘an integrated platform for childcare policy information’ which provides integrated information and one-stop childcare service. Seventh, the level of awareness of infant-rearing support policies is high as 90% in the area of ‘cash support’, but the awareness of childcare service and time supports is high only in some programs, while the level of awareness and actual experience of using the time support system which was adopted recently appears to be extremely low, showing a large discrepancy in different policies and support programs. Especially, the differences in demanding to improve the ‘time support’ system have been turned out to be significant by gender. The study also finds that the time support program which helps the families take care of their own child(ren) is mainly used by the mothers. Eighth, the results of the expert survey show that the majority are in favor of the expansion of various childcare support policies as a desirable direction. However, many have pointed out that the support expansion should be enhanced and focused on the time support rather than cash support. In addition, some experts have suggested ‘age- specific difference’ in childcare support, which strengthens the ‘time support’ for the families with ‘younger child(ren) and strengthens the ‘service support’ as the children grow old. Ninth, this study has asked about the potential impacts of policy changes, such as introduction of parent benefits, and extended parental leave. First, the experts have expected that the parent benefit would reduce the buren of childcare costs, the demands for the service of day care centers would be the same, and the extended parental leave would increase the use of such leave by both men and women, while the use period would be more increase among women. In addition, the experts have expected that the pay raise of parental leave benefit would increase both the use rate of parental leave and the use period in both genders. Tenth, the experts have answered that to systemize infant-rearing support policies, relevant departments should differentiate the policy direction and strategies depending on the ages, especially 0~1 years old, and that the most limited category or the category that shows poor implementation of the support policies is ‘time support’ category, while ‘cash support’ is overlapped in different programs and thus requires an adjustment by merging and abolishing similar programs. Based on these results, this study has suggested four policy directions to promote the systemization of infant-rearing support policy, that is, ‘re-structuralization toward a consistent policy support system’, ‘securing full and diverse support depending on the needs for childcare support’, ‘differentiation of key childcare support strategies by age’, and ‘improvement of the parents’ accessibility to the policy support.’ To achieve the said goals, this study has also suggested the methods to systemize the support policy based on three criteria, ‘policy objectives’, ‘characteristics of the support targets’, and the ‘support type.’ As for the method by ‘policy objectives’, the study recommends that the supports be divided into ‘service’, ‘cash’ and ‘time’ depending on the objectives, and the support targets be divided into ‘general support’ for infants of all applicable ages and ‘selective support’ for specific targets based on prescribed standards, to sub-categorize the content of support depending on individual targets. As for the methods by support type, the study suggests to systemize the type of support by criteria, by establishing specific criteria of each support type depending on the characteristics of policy categories, such as service, cash, and time support.