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Childcare and the GDP: driving mothers mad?
July 13, 2024
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Now that the Labour Party has won an overwhelming victory, will it be successful in its promise to create 100,000 additional childcare places and more than 3,000 new nurseries? Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said a few weeks ago that his government would "create the childcare places needed to turn the page and rebuild Britain”.
Rebuild Britain?
How does that work?
In a provocative article in The Spectator, Arabella Byrne says that as usual, the emphasis of politicians’ palaver about childcare is on boosting GDP.
Citing her own experience as a working mother of a 9-month-old and a 6-year-old, she says that “the entire narrative feels confused. Instead of asking whether I should work or look after my children – a binary I long ago accepted as one of feminism’s unforgivable failures – I wonder if there might be a case for affordable, state-funded childcare to improve maternal mental health. It would stop women feeling like they might go mad”.
GDP or mental health? In my opinion, no one is asking the right questions.
Priorities
Why doesn’t Sir Keir ask mothers whether they would prefer to leave their children with someone else while they go out to work or would rather look after their own offspring? Many, if not most, would opt for the latter.
The parenting website Netmums claims that seven in 10 working mothers would prefer to stay at home when their children are young. But they can’t. One desperate mother wrote on the website forum:
Me & my DH [dear husband] so want for me to be a stay-at-home mum, but financially, it's impossible. When I was on maternity leave each time, I kept the house immaculate, cooked from scratch, the boys had a good bedtime routine and I could put more time in, husband was less stressed and focused on work, which got him 10k a year pay rise all because he didn't have to take half the load at home. But we can't take the financial hit … it's put a massive strain on our marriage. I am crying every day with stress, suffering migraines and sleeping all the time, I wake up dreading the start of every day.
Sound familiar?
Despite this, governments continue to push mothers of young children into work. Liz Truss, our former PM, then child care minister, said in 2013 that countries like Germany had boosted their economies by increasing the number of mothers who returned to work after having children. “It is obviously true that having a higher maternal employment rate does help a country’s GDP,” she said.
It's not so obvious to me.
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Ironically, “free childcare” is paid for by taxpayers, which includes the working mothers said to benefit from it. Of course, childcare staff is expensive, so the ratio of children to highly trained staff keeps rising. If a mother stays at home to look after her child, the ratio is one-to-one and no training is needed.
The logic of childcare is baffling.
However, I have to admit that it worked out perfectly well in Communist countries where mothers were liberated from the home and enslaved in the workplace.
Child or adult-centric?
Ms Byrne’s mother left her with “an elderly neighbour so that she could write”, 40 years later explaining unapologetically that she “needed to work to feel normal again – I didn’t want to go mad”. So, based on her experience, she feels that we should prioritise mothers’ mental health rather than the GDP.
Ms Byrne insists that “maternal mental health is in dire straits”, citing a study published by the Maternal Mental Health Alliance last year. It claimed that “suicide continues to be the leading cause of direct maternal death between six weeks and 12 months after birth, accounting for 39 percent of deaths in this period”.
This is nonsense.
The Alliance’s definition of maternal death is the World Health Organisation’s, which includes “termination, miscarriage or birth and ectopic pregnancies”. In other words, it includes suicides of new mothers with suicides following abortion – which is the very opposite of childbirth. Abortion does indeed represent a suicide risk for women, but if birth was an equally high risk for new mothers, the human race would have died out long ago.
I applaud Ms Byrne’s scepticism about the GDP. But what does it do to children’s mental health to grapple with the realisation that their mother’s work is more important than they are; that they are an obstacle to her well-being, which is invested in paid work; that their care, and even their very existence, might be driving her mad?
If they do manage to become mothers, women know that while someone else could probably do their paid work, their child has only one mother. The thought of someone else – even a childcare professional – filling that position is enough to damage their mental health.
The inconvenient truth is that the real focus of the childcare debate should be on the mental health of the child. How will this generation cope with being cared for by strangers in the years when they need their mother most?
Do you think the emphasis on state-sponsored childcare has gone too far? Leave your comments below.
Ann Farmer writes from the United Kingdom.
Image credit: Pexels
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Ann Farmer commented 2024-07-15 06:55:35 +1000Janet, many thanks for your very interesting insights. My own experience dates from the 1950s but in those decades it was a very different world for mothers and for children – much better in my opinion.
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Michael Cook followed this page 2024-07-14 11:17:07 +1000 -
