A few Babygros and a tub of Sudocrem won’t wipe away the ills that prevent us starting families

IT was established custom, at least during my childbearing years, for all new mothers to leave hospital armed with not just a squealing bundle of joy but a supersized plastic bag containing nappy samples, mini tubs of Sudocrem and vouchers for baby photographs.

Through the fog of new motherhood, most of us probably didn’t realise that we were targets for an age-old marketing wheeze, let alone get around to looking at the mountain of advertising material.

But now it seems that the baby manufacturers’ post-natal sales pitch may be about to become extinct – with the national rollout of baby boxes for all new parents.

Short of a jewel-encrusted rattle or a Fabergé egg, the baby box or starter kit contains all the baby essentials. Newborn clothes and soft toys, nappies and blankets as well educational books: the box itself even doubles as a baby crib.

Baby boxes were introduced in Finland in the 1930s, originally as part of a drive to reduce the country’s high rate of cot deaths. They proved an effective means of helping save infant lives and caught on in other countries.

Poverty

In Ireland, as is often the case, we are a bit late to the baby box party and unsurprisingly, our motives for embracing them are a little different and a lot more questionable than those of our Finnish cousins.

In the first place, our cot death rate is thankfully low and secondly, we no longer have the levels of grinding poverty and deprivation that would have made baby boxes a godsend for families in the 1930s. Thirdly, it’s hard to see how baby boxes can have much of a role in a culture with a long and proud tradition of swapping baby clothes and equipment, to the point that even well-heeled style mavens refuse to buy newborn clothes on a point of principle.

Our grounds for introducing baby boxes are rather more spurious than either health or poverty-alleviation measures.

Instead they are the first part of the Government’s ‘baby boom strategy’ aimed at increasing birth rates.

According to newspaper reports, Minister for Children Katherine Zappone is leading a high-level task force to examine a wide range of policies to reduce financial and health barriers faced by parents considering having more children.

Ireland may have the highest birth rate in Europe but the 2016 rate of 1.8 is historically low and policy-makers are naturally alarmed that it’s less than the key rate of 2.6 (children per women) needed to replace the population.

But while it is timely to look at ways of reversing a trend that threatens to become a social issue and put provision for the next generation of pensioners into jeopardy, it’s hard to see baby boxes playing a decisive role in encouraging procreation.

The problems facing young couples today are simply far too onerous to be resolved by a free basket of baby goodies, courtesy of the State.

Baby boxes may be a well-meaning gesture and an acknowledgment of the financial upheaval new babies can bring through no fault of their own, but they amount to nothing more than putting icing on a cake that is crumbling and falling apart.

For how on earth could a Babygro and a pair of booties soothe the nerves of a first-time mother or father who has not yet got on the property ladder and sees spiralling house prices dwarf their life savings, making their chances of putting a roof over their heads even more remote?

Stability

The Government acknowledges that affordable family homes are now out of the reach of couples earning a combined income of €92,000. With rents in the private sector soaring and a limited supply of rental stock suited to family life, parents rightly believe that if they want to provide stability for their children, they have little option but to become homeowners.

Yet the queues last week of young families outside an about-to-be-launched housing scheme in Dublin 15 – like a throwback to the frenzied buying sprees of the Celtic Tiger – clearly illustrate how a generation of new buyers has been failed by a defunct housing policy.

If finding a suitable home isn’t an obstacle for young couples who are contemplating starting a family, then unless they are extremely well off, the problem of affordable, quality childcare will surely keep them awake at night.

Minister Zappone has made an honourable attempt to streamline the childcare industry and put it on a more businesslike footing.

The expansion of the free preschool year to two years has, to be fair, helped relieve the burden on couples who struggled to pay what was effectively a second mortgage for reliable childcare.

The problem, however, with the Government’s Affordable Childcare Scheme is that it fails to take account of the preference of many Irish parents and indeed childminders for informal arrangements where intimacy and flexibility with hours is prized over safety standards and staff numbers.

This means that while parents who use creches registered with the scheme can avail of subsidies to reduce their eyewatering bill, those who don’t, or can’t due to irregular working hours, lose out.

There’s also the Government’s bizarre approach to children’s health; on the one hand delivering free GP care to every child under six years old in the country regardless of family wealth – and on the other, failing to tackle the endless waiting lists for speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, not to mention respite hours and supports for families of special-needs children.

Despair

The despair of special-needs families sends out one message only to putative parents – that they are on their own should, God forbid, their children have developmental problems.

The range of pressures heaped on parents explains why, despite advice about their ticking biological clocks, Irish women keep putting off having children.

A 2015 Eurostat survey found the majority of women in the EU give birth to their first child in their 20s, whereas in Ireland more than 50% of women were giving birth for the first time in their 30s.

Worries about career advancement, home ownership, finances and childcare (two-thirds of Irish mothers would prefer to stay at home to raise their children) help explain why, increasingly, couples believe that they must wait until they are older to have children or decide not to have them at all, or to just have a small family.

It is a trend seen all over Europe but nowhere as intensely as here, where a panoply of problems – from severe underinvestment in the childcare industry, the crisis in the housing market and a tranche of recession-era policies that highlighted self-reliance over social welfare provision – have come together to create a climate that actively discourages procreation.

If Katherine Zappone’s baby boom strategy is to stand any chance of success it must address these big policy areas, instead of tinkering around the fringes with free Babygros and Sudocrem.