When did bringing up a baby become a rich woman’s luxury?
At the beauty salon, I was chatting to two therapists I’ve got to know really well about their hopes and plans. Saving for a deposit on a house was the primary consideration. Marriage and children could wait. They would be lucky, the girls laughed, if they could afford a place big enough for a baby by the time they were 33. Then, and only then, would they “start trying”.
Gently, I suggested that you really didn’t need something called a “nursery” before you got pregnant. My mother, who was 24 when she gave birth, took me home from the maternity hospital to her mother-inlaw’s council house. They washed me in a pink plastic bath in front of the fire. “Babies don’t know any different. All they need is your love,” I encouraged.
The young women exchanged despairing glances. “It’s all changed now,” one explained. “Even if you can afford a place, there’s the childcare on top. That’s a fortune.”
“Don’t see how Matt and me will ever be able to afford it,” the other sighed.
“But you’d be a fantastic mum,” I insisted. And I was right. She would be. Twenty-nine-year-old Katie is exactly the kind of warm, capable person we need to be raising this nation’s young. But Katie and the other girls in the salon find themselves at a point in history where the stay-home mother has become an endangered species and motherhood itself is increasingly regarded as some kind of costly optional extra. Remarkable figures just published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies reveal a seismic social change. The IFS found that only half of mothers aged between 25 and 54 were in work in 1975. By 2015, 72per cent went back to work, leaving others to change their babies’ nappies and rock them to sleep.
Invariably, we are invited to cheer these great leaps forward for womankind. Even the Conservative Party, long-time guardian of family values, has started boasting that it has got “more women than ever before into work!” Pausing for a moment to hear a small inner voice that whispers “But what about the children?” makes you a party-pooper, a deluded dinosaur hankering after the dark days when wives were tethered to the twin-tub and had to ask husbands for housekeeping.
I get that, I really do. And with my feminist hat on, I’m delighted by the long overdue expansion of opportunities for my sex. Still, that small voice again. What about the children? It’s not just the infants dropped at childminders that I worry about. It’s young women like Katie. They have a job they like well enough, sure, but it hardly compares to the immense satisfaction and lifelong joy of raising a wonderful human being.
Behind those IFS statistics, there are remarkable ordinary women like our former nanny, Sam. When she had her own first child, Sam planned to go straight back to work. She and her plasterer husband had little choice if they wanted to go on paying the mortgage. That was before Sam checked out the local nursery and was appalled by the bovine girls mooching about in the galley kitchen making coffee while the toddlers either ran riot in the next room or sat dull-eyed in a corner. Sam decided she could not look after some rich woman’s kids while leaving her own in the care of low-paid, poorly educated nursery workers. With a lot of sacrifices, they could on her husband’s wage manage (only just, mind you…) the luxury of having one parent at home.
This is the sad state of affairs in 2018. A mother looking after her own small children is considered a luxury, even though, in survey after survey, most women – the poor unenlightened things! – say they would prefer to be at home in the early years. They’re caught in a trap. As successive governments encouraged mothers out to work, the more couples could pay for a house and property prices rose.
The share of working-age mothers with a job has risen by a staggering 50per cent in the past four decades. This has probably been the single biggest contributor to the growth of GDP. On the train the other day, I sat opposite a woman who was feeding lunch to her daughter. As she moved spoon towards mouth, the mother named each vegetable, incorporating those simple words into more complex sentences, which her child echoed. I told the woman that her daughter was beautiful – “and it’s great to see such a good mum”.
It really was. We don’t yet know the price society will pay for making it practically impossible for mothers to look after their own children. Anecdotal evidence is building that things are amiss. Two teachers that I know talk of pupils who are five, six, even seven and are still not pottytrained. There’s increased aggression, lack of basic table manners, an alarming growth in speech problems that simply weren’t there 30 years ago.
I find I’m hesitating as I write this. Working mothers feel enough guilt as it is. Many do an amazing double-shift, holding down the office job their father did while retaining their mother’s domestic responsibilities. We deserve a bloody medal, quite frankly. The fact remains that professional middle-class women like me, who can afford decent childcare, have established a template which has been copied by (or imposed on) women like Katie, who will struggle to ever afford an adequate substitute for their own mothering. They postpone motherhood until their 30s in order to afford a small house, and if they run into fertility problems, as so many do, they can’t begin to afford the IVF enjoyed by the celebrity mums of twins in the glossy magazines.
I’m struggling to see this as progress. Are we really happy that possibly the world’s most vital job is now subcontracted to inferior substitutes to satisfy a demand for national growth? That’s not female liberation, it’s economic servitude.
Motherhood needs to be properly valued; there is nothing more productive than love, nor as damaging as its absence. I thank my lucky stars that my mum stayed at home with me when I was small. Even in quite poor circumstances, she gave me the richest of starts. When my own daughter was tiny and I was careering (in both senses) between office and home,
I told myself that I was a good role model for her. Maybe she didn’t want a role model. Maybe she would have preferred her mummy.