Now every man (and woman) is an island

Had you been a fly on the wall in a certain library in Southern England some thirty years ago, you might have been startled by a heavily pregnant woman slamming a book down on a table with a most unladylike exclamation.

The book was a then fashionable guide for new parents and I had just reached the chapter on childcare, which suggested that a mother could return to work as early as six weeks after birth; ”You may be concerned”, it said loftily, “that your child’s caregivers do not have your level of education or language skills, but these worries are unfounded; studies have shown that this will have no long-term detrimental effect on your child’s development.”

The book did not, as far as I could see, offer much information about these ‘studies’, or what evidence they provided for their findings, but it was clear in its message that ‘quality time’ at weekends more than made up for a baby being farmed out for the majority of its waking hours (in educational terms, at least). Breathtaking intellectual snobbery aside, there was something disturbing in its complacent assertion that, while the child may repeatedly cry or show distress when left at nursery or with a nanny, this should not prevent the mother from returning to work (the same advice appears on today’s NHS information website).

The Shadow Education Secretary’s recently announced plan to make childcare available for all children from the age of nine months is another manifestation of the belief that children will thrive away from their mothers from a very early age. What concerns me about her arguments are that, while she cites mothers who ‘have to give up jobs they love’ because of a lack of childcare and the need for single mothers to be able to work, she makes no mention of the effect on the child.

Raising a child is - or should be - a huge responsibility. Every experience and every new piece of knowledge will contribute to the adult it will eventually become. I find it hard to understand how a mother would willingly - or even cheerfully - pass her infant over to the influence of relative strangers for almost the entirety of its weekday waking hours rather than be there herself to oversee its development and provide comfort whenever necessary. In any case, children under 3 naturally suffer from separation anxiety; it seems inhumane to override this by making the mother’s interests paramount.

Staying at home with a baby or a young child can be frustrating, boring and lonely at times - we were never meant to rear our children in isolation and some mothers may need support in the form of mother-and-baby groups and help to access the activities on offer - but it also means that the parent is a constant presence and a source of continuous reassurance when the child’s brain and emotional behaviour patterns are developing at their fastest rate. We may have invented smartphones but we still respond to the same pheromones and biological cues as our ape ancestors; for a pre-verbal child, being deprived of its mother’s presence for hours at a time on a daily basis must surely have a detrimental effect.

In fact, that effect may now be making itself evident. The generation born around the time that book was published (and Harriet Harmann was boasting about the number of UK working mothers with children under 5) has turned away from the institution of marriage to a startling extent: in 1976, 90% of men and 80% of women under 30 were married, while by 2019, the figures stand at a third and a quarter respectively with a further decline predicted for the future. Meanwhile, England and Wales last year passed the landmark point of a majority of babies being born out of wedlock.

Admittedly many more people are willing to embark on long-term relationships without marriage but there does appear to be a shift towards serial monogamy and away from commitments surviving long enough to rear children. The knock-on effect of universal childcare policies may turn out to be a solipsistic society composed of individuals whose formative experiences have left them unable to sustain stable relationships in adult life and a resulting manifold increase in state subsidies for single parents.

Sense at last!

Double cause for celebration today; not only will 2015 OQ21 soon be whizzing by a mere 568,000 km away but a journalist has, at long last, said the hitherto unsayable.

History, they say, is written by the victors. Mainstream media opinions on working mothers, in the same way, tend to be written by women who have delegated at least some of their childcare to other women (men, of course, would not dare to pronounce on such a contentious issue and childless women tend to keep their own counsel).

While full-time mothers hover around the edges in comment threads or the blogosphere, the floor of mainstream media and political coverage is firmly held by working mothers intent on justifying their own course of action.

It's also worth noting that we hear little from women who have returned after a full career break; the reason for that becomes lamentably clear when trying to get back into the workplace after a prolonged absence.

I've made my views on this issue known here before* but it is a breath of fresh air to read this from Sarah Vine (or, as she is also known, Mrs Michael Gove):

...the whole concept of childcare has a way of short-circuiting our internal feminist wiring. On the one hand, it’s our right to have meaningful careers; on the other, it’s also our right to have children. 

There’s just one tiny problem: who’s going to look after the kids? 

That is the great paradox of feminism: for every woman forging ahead in the workplace, there’s another taking her place in the home.

Regular readers may recognise more than a little similarity to a post which appeared here last November: 'There are plenty of high-flying self-styled feminists who apparently see nothing incongruous in their household outsourcing the domestic chores to an assortment of low-paid females.' 

Admittedly, it's taken her a while to see the light - she describes having been, in effect, a 'benign but distant' fifties-style 'father' to her young children for years - but better late than never; the response of her children has clearly convinced her that being there for them is the right thing to do and, to her credit, she has admitted it publicly.

Fact is, nannies make life possible for working mothers, but they are no substitute for being a parent. That, I’m afraid, is the one thing you simply cannot delegate.

Two glasses will therefore be raised in the Tavern this evening; 2015 OQ21 and Sarah Vine, your very good health indeed!


*Essentially this:'I firmly believe that a woman is the intellectual and social equal of a man and should be treated as such - with the proviso that a dependent infant is biologically more important than either man or woman and its needs should come first.'



Update: As a bonus, this URL from the Express surely qualifies for some kind of award:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/592987/End-of-the-world-asteroid-Blood-Moon-September-apocalypse-armageddon-comet-meteor

Hot Air, Harman and Hogging It All

Demetrius, as always, hits the nail squarely on the head:

"The sweltering heat in the South and East of England arises from a plume of high pressure caused by hot air movement unusual for this time of year. This is due to a surge of political manifestos."

Foremost among the noxious emissions is the flatulence emanating from Harriet Harman's Big Pink Battle Bus under the guise of a 'Women's Manifesto' - surely as clear an illustration as white facepaint on black celebrities of the principle that discrimination is, for some at least, definitely a one-way street.

Among other gems, this document apparently promises guaranteed childcare from 8am to 6pm, to 'set a goal for fifty per cent of ministerial appointments to public boards to be women' - nothing like ensuring you always get the best person for the job! - and to double paid paternity leave.

It also includes the bright idea of four weeks of unpaid childcare leave for working grandparents; having brought up their own children without the benefit of recent childcare subsidies and tax credits, grandparents are now being invited to forego a month's wages so their grown-up offspring can get to work.

This is apparently because grandmothers "give up their work when the kids are little in order to help the mothers and fathers balance work and home" - in other words, to enable mothers to leave their new babies and find career-based fulfilment in the workplace in the approved feminist fashion.

This, it turns out, is less than ideal for the grandmothers, who put their own careers on hold while youth has its day "and then find that they can't go back to work once the children are back at school because once you're in your late 50s and early 60s it's really hard for a woman to get a job then."

Really Harriet? Could this, perhaps, be because the posts for which they are they are suitably qualified and experienced are already occupied by mothers who have farmed out their children on a daily basis in order to get straight back into the workplace?

It all reminds me of 1990s City superwoman Nicola Horlick, interviewed in her kitchen on how she successfully managed her career and family while her mother silently tackled a sinkful of washing-up in the background. According the the Mail, 'Research suggests 1.9 million grandparents have given up a job, reduced their hours, or taken time off work to look after their grandchildren.'

It appears that the 'having it all' generation of career women, encouraged by the likes of Harman, not only want the taxpayer to fund their childcare but also expect their mothers to sacrifice their own careers to take up the slack; how fortunate, then, that Harman's happy compromise means the grandparents only lose a month's salary instead!

As a bonus, this issue has given us a contender for the most meaningless soundbite of the campaign so far - though, as ever, there's plenty of competition:

"When asked about whether he was assuming that older women could afford to work for free, Mr Miliband said that this was "about going with the grain of people's lives" and that the modern workplace needed to reflect "the reality of family life"."

Why I Am No Longer a Feminist

(Are you sitting comfortably? I fear this is going to be a long post....)

Feminism has been much in the news recently so this is, I suppose, a good time to admit that I have been there, done that and bought the boiler suit.

In the high and far-off times, I talked the talk, walked the walk - still do; I can't shake off a determined stride that is death to kitten heels - and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Sisterhood, Reclaiming the Night, subscribing to Spare Rib and running a university Women's Group (through which I achieved my sole claim to media fame; being (mis)quoted in Private Eye's 'Wimmin' column).

So what happened? Well, for one thing, many of the issues for which we marched have been resolved - in Britain, at least - through legislation, rule changes and the natural wastage of residual misogyny among those in high places, some of whom, back then, had been born to mothers who could not vote until the age of 30.

Today's young British women are looking at a world where very few doors are closed against them, and most of those for medical or anatomical reasons, as legal and economic pressure opens their way into such former bastions of masculinity as sporting clubs, the Church of England, public schools and even, potentially, front-line combat.

Like racism, discrimination is apparently a one-way street, making it acceptable - if not desirable - to select all-women shortlists and promote women in preference to men; equality is clearly not a consideration.Thus Gordon Brown could announce in 2010 that  'Under Labour, there are more students at university than ever before and I'm happy to say the majority of them are women'.

With the demise of these time-honoured establishment targets, feminists might have turned their attention to those British women whose freedoms are still curtailed by cultural and religious attitudes or by their own low expectations and early single motherhood were it not for the small matter of politics.

For left-leaning feminists, the idea of reform from the top down was a pleasing one; criticising potential working-class Labour voters or confronting the less agreeable aspects of the multiculturalism we were told to 'celebrate' was quite another matter. In the same way, many feminists are strangely reticent on the subject of women's status in less enlightened parts of the world.

In any case, liberation is relative: as Robbie Coltrane's character in the TV series 'Cracker' once pointed out, "While you're out lecturing on Women's Studies and career opportunities, some poor cow's got her arm half-way round your U-bend". There are plenty of high-flying self-styled feminists who apparently see nothing incongruous in their household outsourcing the domestic chores to an assortment of low-paid females.

What was needed was a less contentious target, which brings us to the elephant quietly gestating in the corner of the room; as Lynne Featherstone helpfully explained, “One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact that women still have babies" (some have even managed to outsource that to other women but surrogacy is, as yet, comparatively rare).

Until we reach Huxley's Brave New World, biology still has the upper hand and modern feminists are really, really annoyed about it. Motherhood is, of course, their right and prerogative, but how dare this helpless infant require their presence when they could be climbing the promotion ladder and hammering on the glass ceiling!

Fortunately childcare, too, can be outsourced, thanks to a host of feminist-approved government policies subsidising nursery places for babies as young as six weeks. The doctrine of 'quality time' theoretically allows mothers to return to work with a clear conscience, reassured that two days with the baby at the end of a busy working week is enough.

Imagine the outcry if zoo staff walked into the primate cages on weekday mornings and removed every infant chimpanzee or gorilla from its mother's arms to a distant crèche until the zoo closed for the night. While human mothers may not suffer - consciously, at least - in the same way as their ape counterparts would, what of the helpless infants persistently deprived of their mothers' presence throughout their waking hours?

Many of the feminists of my day, celebrating centuries-old traditions from a variety of cultures, embraced the idea of motherhood as an equal and alternative assertion of female power and identity; for today's colder, harder activists, it has become a lifestyle choice which must not be allowed to get in the way of advancement, even if the mother herself would prefer to stay with the child.

My brief official involvement with feminism coincided with the last years before Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman unleashed their progressive ideology and overturned the idea of the traditional family in the political arena. While men are viewed with hostility, some of today's feminists reserve their fiercest criticism for well-qualified stay-at-home mothers who have chosen, whatever the financial sacrifice, to take a career break.

I firmly believe that a woman is the intellectual and social equal of a man and should be treated as such - with the proviso that a dependent infant is biologically more important than either man or woman and its needs should come first. With the exception of a few physically demanding jobs, the mind is what matters in the workplace and the hardware that accompanies it should be irrelevant.

But when the term 'feminist' is applied, seemingly without irony, to callipygian celebrities famed for suggestive dance routines or to politicians who seek to separate mothers from their children, and when self-styled feminists celebrate women being promoted over the heads of equally-qualified men, those of us who merely seek an amiable parity and mutual respect need to find another name.

Quote of the week - a voice of reason

Natalie Solent at Samizdata on media-led criticism of boarding schools (via Tim Worstall):

'How come giving your ten year old child to “a stranger who does not love them” is to place their happiness and your very soul as a parent at hazard but giving your three month old child to a stranger who does not love them is practically obligatory on grounds of gender equity?'

The comments at both, predictably, are veering somewhat into 'Bloggers' Schooldays' territory, but it's reassuring to know there are others out there questioning the accepted narrative.

It never ceases to amaze me that, given the way they micro-manage every other aspect of their lives, some women appear quite happy to hand their child over to someone else for most of its weekday waking hours during the crucial early development stages - or to encourage and legislate for other women to do so.

In some American states, animal welfare legislation makes it illegal to separate a puppy under 8 weeks old from its mother; translate that into human terms and you have to wonder what our society is doing to its children.

The state's your mother, your father...

There are times when I feel like the small boy who wonders why the Emperor has no clothes on.

With unemployment for recent graduates running at 20% (and a further 40%  in low-skilled work and unable to secure what the ONS defines as 'graduate jobs'), and in the general population at 8.6%, why does the government seem hell-bent on getting mothers of young children into the workplace?

Every morning this week, while one in five of last year's final-year students is still curled up in bed with nothing to look forward to but a day of sending out yet more CVs or signing on once again, an army of working mothers will be frantically trying to orchestrate the demands of preparing for a day's work with childcare arrangements for their infants.

Don't get me wrong - I am all for equality in the workplace and believe that men and women should be treated the same way;  it's just that, when it comes to child-rearing, it seems that my priorities, based on personal and professional experience, differ somewhat from the prevailing Zeitgeist.

Having taken on the responsibility of bringing a new human being into the world, I cannot imagine willingly deciding that his need for consistent care and personal contact during infancy should be subordinate to my right to a career, even had I been prepared to entrust his earliest intellectual and moral development to someone else.

It was, admittedly, easier to be a stay-at-home parent in a deprived area during the 1990s recession; having one stable, albeit modest, household income meant we were relatively privileged and the necessary economies and self-denial were nothing out of the ordinary for the community in which we lived - although they might seem extreme to today's smartphone-and-Sky-TV generation.

Over the intervening years, the arrival of tax credits has dramatically skewed the picture, as have the abolition of MIRAS for the family home and the inability to transfer tax allowance to non-working partners. Successive government policies, aided and abetted by consistent media bias, have attempted to portray the working mother as the natural default setting.

We've been treated recently to abundant media exposure of 'welfare queens', flaunting vast broods that, judging by the closeness in age of the children, owe as much to modern anaesthesia in childbirth and the loss of the natural contraceptive effects of breastfeeding as they do to a flawed benefits system.

The aim of much of the 'Woman's Hour' and media-led 'having-it-all' propaganda appears to be to tar all stay-at-home mothers with the same brush as these largely ill-educated women with a suggestion that they are wasting their time and abilities.

It's hard not to see it all as a general condemnation of all parents as unfit to bring up their own children, a suggestion that state-approved institutions or individuals will do the job better than the biological parents, even when this is achieved at the cost of mass unemployment among the single and childless at the start of what should be lifelong careers.

While there are undoubtedly people out there who embark on parenthood with less forethought and consideration than they would give the purchase of a new television set and whose children could well be be better off in a secure and stimulating nursery, it seems wrong to rig the system so that caring for your own child becomes a luxury available only to the rich or those in receipt of state benefits, including the tiny minority who exploit the tax credit scheme.

It may generate plenty of economic activity in the childcare sector, but to subsidise childcare for working parents while paying to maintain the childless in enforced idleness as they look for work surely makes very little sense. Why not use the same money to give stay-at-home mothers an income that recognizes the importance of their work and free up the jobs for new workers?

And what of the children? Studies suggest that nursery care before the age of three may contribute to insecurity, aggression and an inability to concentrate - characteristics that any teacher can tell you are rife in today's classrooms. Naturally, the defenders of early daycare are up in arms at this - 'my child is perfectly well-adjusted!', they exclaim - but where's the control for this massive social experiment? In any case, what suits one child may be completely wrong for another.

Despite government claims of one million would-be working parents deterred by childcare costs - cited as justification for the latest tax breaks - no one really knows how many mothers (or fathers) would choose to stay at home with their under-5s, given better financial provision and a society that appreciates and supports the role that parental input plays in a child's emotional, social and intellectual development.

Surely the many rights and liberties which we expect from a civilized society should include the freedom to raise one's own child without financial penalties.

"Where's the foetus going to gestate? ...

...Are you going to keep it in a box?"

Lynne Featherstone has put her elegantly manicured finger on what is stopping today's women achieving their full potential:

“One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact that women still have babies.” 

Er...yes - I mean, who else is going to do it?

By popular demand:

A question of childcare

Say what you like about Aric Sigman, the man has guts.

The author of books on the effects of a drinking culture and television on children is no stranger to controversy, but this week he boldly goes where few men have gone before; he has taken on that most redoubtable of foes, the working mother.

Putting children into day care may change their brain structure and function, according to research. 

The study by Dr Aric Sigman found that 70-80% of children in day care centres showed increasing levels of the stress hormone cortisol throughout each day they were there.

Now that's what I call putting your head above the parapet! Up and down the country, I imagine mothers preparing for work were screaming at the radio as Sigman explained his findings on the Today programme, suggesting that sustained raised cortisol levels could have as-yet undetermined effects on the child's long-term health.

Now, I have to admit that there are times when I feel like echoing Ripley's outburst in 'Aliens' - "Did IQ's just drop sharply while I was away?" - and when the issue of daycare comes up is one of them.

It's well-known that taking a puppy away from its mother too early means that you're more likely to end up with an insecure or even aggressive pet; why do so many people persist in believing that the same would not apply to a six-week-old baby suddenly deprived of its mother for most of the day?

And what benefit does the mother see from this? Well, there are plenty of high-flying career women going straight from the labour ward to their desks but its a fair bet they can afford high-quality one-to-one childcare (or follow the example of superwoman Nicola Horlick, who tellingly conducted an interview on how she single-handedly managed a career and a young family with her mother bent wordlessly over a sink-full of washing-up in the background).

The reverse of the coin are those mothers for whom childcare swallows up most of their earnings - my sister once worked for a high-street shop where some of the staff, once they paid for childcare, lunch and travel, had less than £20 a week left over.

So why do they do it? For some, whether by inclination or because they have bought into the 'having it all' culture, it's definitely because they want to - begging the question 'why have a baby at all if you don't want to spend time with it?' - but plenty of women out there are trapped by a phenomenon familiar to anyone who drives on busy motorways.

Ever hogged the middle lane because you know that, if you pull in behind the lorry 500m ahead, you'll never get back out to overtake it? The same thing is happening in employment, with mothers reluctantly heading back to work because they fear that, if they drop out until the child goes to school, they may never find another job.

And of course they are right - because so many of the available jobs are already taken up by other mothers of under-5s. I'm no Mark Wadsworth but even I can see this doesn't make sense at all; if Ms A goes out to work and pays most of her income after work expenses to her childminder Ms B, then why not cut out the middle-man (sorry, woman!) and give Ms B the job in the first place?

The answer, of course, is economic activity, two women in the workplace and paying tax are better than one, even if the workplace of one is the other's home and the childcare is subsidised by the state - it's a bit like the bank wanting us to transfer money back and forth between accounts because it shows up on the books as income and productive banking activity.

If Sigman is right, and babies do suffer long-term ill effects from being put into childcare at an early age, then it could spell the end of a culture that regards infants as so many parcels to be left until called for; the ultimate expression of baby as accessory to a lifestyle.

It would be interesting to see if that correlates with a subsequent improvement in Britain's educational standards and achievement.

You do the maths....

In the early 1940s, with much of the male population away on military service, an army of women went out to work in Britain's cities while their children were left with carers or evacuated to the country. These children often lacked a single constant parental figure or role model in their lives at a formative stage and bonded instead with other children in mutual ignorance.

Twenty years later, this happened:

In the early 1990s, in the wake of Harriet Harman's IPPR pamphlet 'The Family Way', in which she trumpeted the apotheosis of feminism as she saw it - a matriarchal household free from male influence, a radio interviewee could declare proudly:
"I am pleased to say that Britain now has the highest proportion of working mothers with children under five in the whole of Europe."

A massive drive to get mothers of young children into the workplace promoted daycare from as early as six weeks, particularly if the mother was a lone parent. Another generation of children grew up with absent fathers and limited contact with their mothers, learning their behaviour from other children instead.

Twenty years later, this happened:

Update: Turns out I'm not the only one to have thought of this - Guido Fawkes has been thinking along remarkably similar lines.