‘ Love is passionate and implacable’
“Care is cool and careful, reasoned, a word that implies distance and limits. Love is not. Love is passionate and implacable, intense, unreasoned …
“ We do not expect an adult to easily replace a beloved person with another. It violates our sense of the preciousness of individual people, and even our sense of what love is. Yet we expect this of a baby.”
It is a critique that cuts to the core because it attacks something about which there is already great ambivalence — rare is the new mother who drops off her infant at daycare or leaves her baby with a nanny without being hit by a rush of angst and guilt.
Ms. Manne argues against the most strident childcare advocates who say it is society’s expectations of motherhood that lie behind those feelings: “It is not just the social construction of motherhood that makes us feel guilty. It is the expression on the face of a child.”
To make her case that the trend of putting babies and young children into long daycare is creating a behavioural time bomb, Ms. Manne pulls together some of the latest research into attachment theory, neurobiology and social development.
For example, she cites recent studies into children’s levels of cortisol, a potent stress hormone. While the normal pattern is for levels to be highest in the morning and lowest in the afternoon, studies in the U.S. and Australia have found that even children in medium- to high-quality childcare centres show high levels in the afternoon.
She also points to broad-based studies by the U.S.- based National Institute of Child Health and Development that found that longer hours in childcare negatively affected mother-infant sensitivity and attunement: “More time in care predicts less harmonious mother-infant interaction and less sensitive mothering at six, 15, 24 and 36 months of age, even when quality of childcare and family selection variables are controlled.”
Ms. Manne says her intention in raising these concerns is not to discourage parents from ever using childcare, but rather to push governments to bolster familyfriendly benefits such as parental leaves and flexible work schedules to allow those with young families to put off seeking outside care until their children are older.
The book fits alongside recent works by other maternal feminists lauding the forgotten merits of motherhood, such as Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood and Daphne de Marneffe’s Maternal Desire.
Like them, Ms. Manne has eschewed the traditional feminist line that women can have it all, but rather is advocating on behalf of women “ who want it all, simply not all at once.”
Still, she has been pilloried by some for delivering advice on mothering from a position of privilege that few can hope to attain. Her book has been criticized as an attack on mothers, particularly poorer mothers who can ill afford to take time away from work.
She says she knows that her own experience — with a comfortable income and a universityprofessor husband who was able to take time off work to juggle the responsibilities of early childhood — is not universal and she isn’t advocating that women restrict their lives to motherhood.
“But how far we move away from the traditional perception of what the word mother means, matters. Should we pretend that hired caregivers can give what mothers give to their children? Should we expect women to live like men when a child is just born?”