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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 is tough on men too.

      ‘Childcare allows men to avoid responsibility for their children. Women have to pay for others to look after their children because men aren’t willing to cut back on their work hours to do their share of the parenting. If women go back to work, it should be men, not children, who alter their lives accordingly.’

      Cathleen Sherry is a nuanced kind of feminist who thinks children have rights too, and she knows that there is more to life than what money can buy. She is also a strong believer in governments providing proper support to those vulnerable women – especially single mothers – who need financial support to care for their children properly. She does not see it as just that poorer women should be forced into the workforce, to the cost of their children’s nurture. As she points out, in most countries the law only requires a child care centre to have one carer for every five babies.

      ‘It is like having a mother on her own caring for quintuplets. One baby wakes and needs to be fed. Another is crying, needing comfort but has to wait; they all have to wait their turn for comfort, affection, cuddles, – all the things that babies need…In maternity hospitals, it is no longer the done thing to have newborn babies lined up in a nursery with a couple of nurses looking after them. That is seen as terrible. Mothers are strongly persuaded to have their babies with them 24 hours a day. Yet six weeks later is okay to put ten of them in a nursery with just two carers. It doesn’t make sense.’

      In a nutshell

       The statistics about nursery-care usage are deceiving unless analysed properly.

       Slammers – who put their babies straight into full-time daycare – make up less than 5 per cent of the UK’s parents.

       Sliders – who gradually use some care, often not starting until three years of age and often part-time – make up about 35 per cent.

       Those who use no group care at all, only themselves supplemented by grandparents and friends occasionally, make up around 60 per cent. Prominent in this sector are blue-collar parents and ethnic minorities.

       Catherine Hakim believes government policies should meet the needs of adaptive and stay-at-home parents, while at present they only serve the work-driven 20 per cent. She’s right.

       The big question is – what is best for the child?

       3 Does nursery harm under-threes?

      The daycare debate first began to really heat up about thirty years ago. As the use of day nurseries for very young children increased in the 1970s, child development experts began to be concerned about what this kind of care might do to the child. The effects of separation from parents in wartime had become a major area of study, and was already leading to changes in how children were treated – for instance, it was realized that children in hospitals needed to have their parents visit daily or, even better, stay with them, while in the past they had been actively prevented from visiting more than once a week. Dr John Bowlby’s research into ‘attachment’ problems in children separated from their parents was now cited to suggest that the bond between mother and child, known to be necessary to the healthy development of children, was endangered if a mother entered full-time work too soon, and that children in nurseries would not develop well without the secure and loving input that a parent or family member provides.¹

      Vested interests

      At the same time, a new industry – and a new profession – was mushrooming around the demand for well-conducted nurseries, and ‘Early Childhood’ departments sprang up in universities and technical colleges, aimed at training childcare directors and teachers. These departments were well funded by governments on both the left and right, who saw the tax advantages of having everyone in the workforce, with the additional advantage of appearing progressive and woman-friendly at the same time.

      These departments were often set up in universities that already had psychology departments with child development units within them, which trained psychologists and child welfare workers. These parallel faculties often found themselves preaching opposite points of view – though both were committed to the well-being of children, they had different ways of arriving there. A common statement from the Early Childhood school of thought was the fatalistic one that nursery care ‘was here to stay’ and that therefore ‘we have to do what we can to make it as good as possible’. The opposing camp felt that parents must СКАЧАТЬ