Raising Babies: Should under 3s go to nursery?. Steve Biddulph

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      The article went on to report that:

      ‘On the other side of Birmingham, on another large housing estate, Chelmsley Wood, the mothers at the Sure Start project have very strong views on the subject. As one of the first projects of its kind, it runs the services parents asked for – a drop-in centre, programmes to support parents, encouraging them to read and sing nursery rhymes with their children – but it has no daycare. One of the mothers, Kate, is planning to go back to work, but only when her son is at school: “Tom is my only child, he’s so precious. I’m frightened and not sure about daycare. It would worry me too much, that he was spending too much time with other people.”’

      Another mother, Clare, went back to work after three months with her first child. That was eight years ago, and this time around she’s determined to do it differently: ‘I missed out on so much and I said I would never do that again. I will wait until my children are in full-time school.’

      Blue-collar parents are much more reluctant to use nurseries than the middle classes. So are immigrant parents and refugees. A higher value is placed on family cohesion among the poor, and often it is all that stands between them and annihilation. Many US daycare centres now deliberately recruit staff from Hispanic backgrounds because these young women tend to be more loving, tender, patient and good humoured – more natural, and good with children. Parents prefer them. White carers tended to be more self-centred, less caring and colder. Are those cultures that are closer to an agrarian, family-oriented way of life the last receptacles of the ability to love children? What does that say for where we are heading?

      Having it all?

      The media must accept a lot of the responsibility for shaping the attitudes and beliefs of young parents as to what is normal: ‘You can have it all’ is a very advertiser-friendly editorial line. A recent magazine article on childcare choices featured photos of unusually good-looking mothers with their babies at the beach. One of the women – a fashion model – told the interviewer: ‘I stayed home for the first six months. Then I put him in a nursery full-time and returned to work. I really needed my independence.’ It was a strange choice of words – a mother is not dependent on her child. (Independence is what you get when you leave your parents – not when you leave your child!) Perhaps what she really meant was ‘I really needed my freedom.’ To be free of this demanding little person, to focus on me again. Except, put that way, it doesn’t sound quite so edifying.

      Several years ago one of the largest bookstore chains in the UK asked me to write a book on ‘Choosing Childcare – deciding what is right for you’. I was excited 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

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