Stay-at-home mothers made to feel ashamed, says bishop
MOTHERS are being made to feel guilty and ashamed if they stay at home, a leading churchman claimed yesterday.
The Bishop of Durham said ministers give the impression that women who do not go out to work are failing both their children and the country.
The Church of England’s advocate for children said he knew of parents who had ‘apologised about their desire to stay at home as if it’s a sin.’
His public intervention came as peers debated Tory legislation that will double free childcare to 30 hours a week for 600,000 families – a subsidy of more than £2,500 a head.
David Cameron said earlier this month that he did not want to lose a moment in ‘going further than ever before to help with childcare costs, helping hard-working families and giving people the opportunity to get into work’.
Ministers say the new subsidy, which comes on top of the annual £5billion state subsidy for childcare, will ‘boost employment rates by enabling more parents, especially women, to return to work’.
But the Right Reverend Paul Butler told the Lords of his concern over ‘the impression increasingly often created that a parent choosing not to work but to raise their child themselves is somehow not doing the best for the nation or the child’.
He said childcare providers shared the worry and had written to him about it. The bishop said one operator complained ‘about the domination of the childcare agenda and how mentioning stay-at-home parenting was met with a brick wall’.
Another provider told him: ‘We are going further down the road of putting pressure on parents and mothers in particular to be valued as economic units rather than having the most important role of parenting their children valued.’
The bishop said: ‘The whole agenda seems to be about the adult first— their right to work, their economic wellbeing, rather than the child first. What is the best for the young child? They cannot speak for themselves.’
The protest from the bishop, who is number four in the hierarchy of the Church of England, adds weight to the growing stay-at-home mother lobby. A number of senior Tory figures believe the tax and benefits system has been stacked against parents who want to stay at home to bring up their own families.
Former Chancellor Lord Lawson and former party chairman David Davis have called for all married couples to be allowed to transfer their income tax allowances to each other, to provide support for married families and more opportunities for one married partner to choose to be a stay-at-home parent.
Research by the Department for Education last year said that over a third of working mothers would like to give up their jobs to stay at home with their family.