Raising Babies: Should under 3s go to nursery?. Steve Biddulph
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about this idea since it was a chance to put across some of the concerns you have been reading about here. I wrote back to them just to be sure. Were they aware that I believed most alternatives to parental care of babies to be seriously second-rate? That I would not recommend nursery care or nannies for children under the age of two? No, it turned out they had not read any of my books, though they had sold millions of them! You could hear the back-pedalling all the way from Australia. They wanted to sell books that made people feel good whatever they chose, and perhaps I wasn’t their man. So, with courtesy and warmth, we parted ways! I guess they found somebody else.
What do you prefer?
Dr Catherine Hakim, a researcher at the London School of Economics, has attracted worldwide attention for some new thinking about the whole question of mothers and paid work.4 Hakim came to the enlightened realization that all of the statistics about childcare that one ever reads were based on what people were doing. But what if they instead asked people what they would prefer to do? Asking this question revealed a completely different picture. Up until that point, governments had made a sweeping assumption – all mothers (and fathers) want to work, and like doing so. In a way, this was as stereotyped as the 1950s idea that all mothers liked staying at home and cooking scones. When people were interviewed about their actual preferences, Hakim found three distinct groups:
1 Home-centred women who give priority to children and family life, and prefer not to do paid work at all. This group makes up about 20 per cent of women in the UK. (And probably of men too, if they were given the choice.)
2 Work-centred women who give priority to careers. Again, this group makes up about 20 per cent.
3 Adaptive women who combine work and family life, but saw work as being something to fit around their family life, rather than the reverse. This group makes up about 60 per cent.
(The focus solely on work and family can be limiting here: most women are also involved in activism, education, and other pursuits that define their lives more broadly than these two specific roles. SB)
Hakim argued that by basing policies on the work-centred 20 per cent, just because they conformed to certain feminist expectations, the home-centred group were disadvantaged, as were the adaptive women, who often preferred shorter hours and other reforms that made it possible to meet the needs of children. This argument had huge implications for governments – for instance, the funds and tax breaks poured into subsidizing nursery care might be better spent on subsidizing those parents who wanted shorter working hours, or simply wish to stay at home and care for their children – and could do so more cheaply and better than nurseries could manage.
Hakim’s work has strong statistical support, and has galvanized discussion, since it allows for more diversity of choice, and is patently more realistic. It also brought to the fore some of the real tensions current in our lives. For instance, at one time it was male managers who did not understand the needs of women in the workforce. Staff I worked with recently at a large university told me a sad story of how the women on the academic staff had eagerly awaited a woman vice-chancellor, who would understand their needs for maternity leave, leave to care for sick children and flexible work hours, only to find that the woman who got the job was far more judgemental and less compassionate than her male predecessor. Their situation went into reverse, and 20 years of gradual gains were wiped out in a year.
Many magazines and press articles have described the ‘Mummy Wars’, in which fierce divisions exist between stay-at-home mothers and mothers in the paid workforce. It’s likely that both groups secretly envy some of the options enjoyed by the other. Hakim’s research would suggest that a large proportion of us would like the benefits of a timely return to work, but not at the expense of our children. It doesn’t seem too hard for employers and governments to meet this reasonable demand. If we also add an availability of fathers to do their part in the early years, then the problem is not insurmountable.
For a young couple contemplating starting a family, or with a new baby at home, it is important to do some hard thinking. We human beings are easily confused, and very much herd creatures. We do what everyone else does. We accept platitudes that really don’t make sense, but sound good. We are told ‘what’s good for you is good for them’. Also our own background has a big effect. If we don’t have a strong experience of parental love in our own childhood, we might not know what we are losing.
There is intense and intelligent discussion going on in the UK today about these choices. Parents in the past have often been fobbed off with bland reassurance, as if parenthood somehow softens the brain, but we are now more educated, more questioning and more networked than ever. And, fortunately, the answers are now emerging to address our concerns. In the following chapters, we will look at this in depth. The big question in choosing between slamming, sliding or staying at home, is: what is best from a child’s point of view?
A woman who asks tough questions
The scene is a large national conference of women lawyers in Sydney, Australia, and the topic is a popular one – combining parenthood with a career. The speakers are all of one mind: ‘There is still much work to be done to overcome discrimination. It is tough being a professional woman and a mother as well.’ The convenor, thanking the morning’s speakers, adds her own exhortation: ‘Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t be working.’
Then, unexpectedly, a hand goes up in the audience. Heads turned to watch as a tall, bespectacled young woman is handed a microphone. ‘No one has ever told me not to work,’ she says, in a clear and thoughtful voice. ‘These days all the pressure we get is to work full-time and to have a successful career.’ She pauses to allow this to sink in. ‘What no one talks about is taking time out to care for our children. That’s the message young women never hear today.’ You could hear a pin drop.
The woman’s name is Cathleen Sherry. She is, in her mid-thirties, already a tenured lecturer in law. Sherry is unusual in her profession, because with a family of three young children, she has reduced her workload by two-thirds, including taking several years off work completely. In Australia, she is a voice of the generational shift within feminism. Since that moment at the conference, she has featured in many media stories, and has written a series of articles of her own. She is saying, loud and clear: ‘What about the children?’
Sherry had come through a conversion experience of her own. When preparing to start her family, she sought out older women lawyers whom she knew were combining family and full-time work. She assumed that she could find role models and mentors to show her how it was done. Instead, she got a huge shock. When these women opened up to her, their lives sounded like a nightmare. They told stories of putting weeks-old babies into daycare, battling exhaustion, failing to acquire mothering skills, having problems with breastfeeding, feeling miserable and conflicted. Some of the older women told her of destroyed marriages and adolescent children with serious problems. A few of her informants did their best to put a positive spin on it all, but others were frankly shattered. As Sherry said, ‘There was no one that I spoke with who gave me the feeling – this is how I would want my life to be.’ The blueprint she was looking for – happily combining family and full-time work – did not exist, at least not in the world of the law.
There was more. As a rights lawyer, often advocating for children in the courtroom, Sherry saw a contradiction. That the sacred cow of the 1990s, a woman’s right to do what she wanted, was a logical fallacy. The needs of every person in the family and community had to be considered together, and balanced against each other. She told one interviewer:
‘No one has an absolute right to a career – men or women. If you choose to have children, your major responsibility is to care for them properly, and if that affects your career, it affects your career. But no one wants to acknowledge this reality…There is more than a dollop of hypocrisy in the fact that men who spend excessive hours in the workplace and little time with their children are considered substandard parents and yet women who do the same are considered “supermums”.’
Sherry