The culture of "motherblame"

THERE was a ghost at the feast during the BBC Panorama programme last week about the effect on children's academic prowess of their mothers working full time. Although glimpsed briefly in a photograph, he was not mentioned by name, role or responsibility. Yet we know he must exist, because if he didn't, neither would the children. He is their father.

But no, the exclusion of the father helped the argument that the mother (a potter who had just embarked on a successful business before the birth of her two daughters) had damaged her offspring by not being available around the clock. She told the interviewer that she made sure she was there for "bath and a story" at the end of the day but, working 18 hours a day to establish her business, she had little time to spend with them.

Where was Dad? Was he working? Had he left them? Not a mention to disturb the thesis that all kids need in this rotten world is dear nurturing Mum at every turn.

Then these perfectly nice English people were further distorted and persecuted by the suggestion that there was something seriously wrong with the elder child. She had, we were told in hushed tones, screaming nightmares when she was a toddler and had difficulty adjusting to a school when she was older. Now if that isn't conclusive proof, the documentary makers seemed to be saying, what is? This child is disturbed. This family is dysfunctional.

I turned off in raging irritation shortly afterwards. But perhaps I shouldn't have expected more. After all, this is the programme that gave you Princess Diana's trembling lip and I was very letdaarn". It also did a hatchet job on single mothers living on benefit, a while ago. What it really should have been unearthing was the real scandal of the number of families totally abandoned by their fathers and the near impossible task of getting men to pay the maintenance ordered by courts.

But to get back to last Monday's threadbare argument: how many children have screaming nightmares at some stage of their lives? I know a perfectly adjusted and charming man of 21 who used to wake up night after night when he was two or three sobbing C-c-ccrocodiles!" Ah, a working mother, the Panorama people (and all those other emotive promoters of "family values" who seem to want to pen women in domesticity again) would cry. Of course this wasn't the case. His mother, brilliant academically and a trained psychologist, had given up work before his birth and did not return thence until he was 14. But that didn't stop the child having screaming nightmares.

The argument is all too simplistic, as well as being terminally confused. On the one hand we are told that (in recent English surveys) the children of middle class mothers who work full time do less well at the GCSE stage than those who have stay at home mothers. But the same does not apply to children from poorer backgrounds: here, the explanation is given - without, it seems, even a trace of shame - that these children benefitted from being in full time childcare which was mostly more stimulating than home with poor downtrodden Mum trying to make ends meet.

All these potentially alarming statistics came in the wake of two high profile sagas of working mothers which engrossed the public. The first was Maire Geoghegan Quinn's decision to quit the Dail after unwelcome press attention to an incident in which her teenage son was involved at his school. Mrs Geoghegan Quinn indicated that the publicity and the distress it caused her family was the straw that broke the camel's back. The second, less widely known here, was the furore over City of London high flier Nicola Horlick, who was sacked from her £1 million job with Deutsche Morgan Grenfell after her employers claimed she had been about to defect to another firm with some of their best staff.

But the real news interest about Ms Horlick, it soon became clear, was that she, at the age of 35, had five children, left the office by 6 p.m. and had a close and stable family life. How dare she!

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist and I am not (yet) suspecting the CIA in this case but does it not seem odious that women should be made to carry, along with briefcase and the pack of Pampers they picked up in their lunch hour, a super overdose of guilt?

We get down to some basic issues here. Men have struggled in from the office (or field) at 7 p.m. for centuries and nobody got hysterical that the children didn't have Daddy around to mend the Dinky truck in the middle of the afternoon.

The man that rang RTE on February 4th to complain that he was sick of all this "man bashing" (of which the presenter, Gareth O'Callaghan, said he had heard none) will be one of those whose mouths will froth if he reads these words but the basic problem here is the inequality of the sexes. Women bear children and they had better damn well like it and have no other ambitions in their lives: it's baldly stated but that was the credo for centuries.

I know an Irishwoman in her 70s and an Australian woman in her 60s, both of whom I consider to be exceptional in their penetrating intelligence and encyclopaedic knowledge. They would have been a wow in the world of work but were never given the opportunity. They raised their families well and adore their children and grandchildren. They are not bitter: I just feel a tiny bit bitter for them.

Yes, I'm a working mother myself and no, I had absolutely no choice about working when my first baby was born. I'm talking food on the table here: remember, that's why a lot of women work.

There is a wonderful 1989 film called Romuald and Juliette which I think of whenever I am feeling over stressed by the conflicting demands of home and work. In that film the central character a single mother, living in a tiny flat in a drab estate on the outskirts of Paris, works all night as a cleaner before coming home to sort out her children's many problems and do whatever piecework she can pick up in the daylight hours. It is romanticised and there is a happy ending but the point is that this is what working mothers are, in so many cases. They are not getting some sort of obscene and illicit fulfilment from "taking a man's job": they are getting money for rent and food which nobody else will provide.

As a working mother I have two jobs: one is what I am doing sitting here, working for The Irish Times. I love it and I know how lucky I am to have a job I love. But I do have a more important job, creating, as much as I can new people for the next generation. If everyone - men and women - regarded this as the important job it is we would have fewer people in prison and on the phone to the Samaritans.

But unfortunately society does not work that way. It is an imperfect world and we struggle with the systems and mores that were created and evolved in the generations which went before us. If the supposed trend of "downshifting" (reducing working hours and salaries to have better quality of life) takes off, perhaps problems such as who minds the children will start to disappear.

So I work. But I don't think it harms my children that I am refusing to play cowboys and native Americans or scary monsters two days a week instead of seven - for nothing is going to turn me into that sort of person. And they forgive me.

I have a supportive husband (like apparently, the women interviewed for the Panorama programme) and I can see how important he is to the children's lives. Why are men being routinely ignored in the new wave of reactionary parental propaganda?

I would like all parents to think that their children are diamonds they are polishing. But I would also like my daughter (as with my son) to think that there are no boundaries to her ability and ambition, that she can be a brain surgeon or a tap dancer or a market gardener, whatever she likes. And nobody is going to tell her that her true fulfilment can only be found in a role that is convenient to the government of the day in its battle with unemployment figures: making a home.

And if you are still anxious, I leave you with a quote from one of the many, many experts totally ignored by Panorama, Dr Ian Roberts of the British Institute of Child Health. "There isn't a scrap of evidence that leaving children in daycare while their mothers go to work is bad for their health or education."