Mothering is a tough job - whether you stay at home or go to work

Whether you can afford to stay home to mind your children or not, some of us need a life outside the home, even if our kids might prefer otherwise, writes MICHELLE McDONAGH

WOMEN WHO work outside the home are fooling themselves when they think their children are happy with this situation: so says the country’s top female broadcaster and mother-of-eight, Miriam O’Callaghan. Staying at home and minding your kids is the hardest job in the world, but the best thing you can do, she believes.

Before I had my own kids, I would have been totally incredulous at the very suggestion that staying at home with children could possibly be harder than going out to work every day. “No maternal instincts,” I would have sniffed. Surely staying at home with the kids every day must be the cushiest number of all? How naive I was.

Only one of my friends admits that she couldn’t wait to get out the door and back to work in the mornings to escape the chaos of home life with two boisterous boys under two. Most others dreaded the return to work after maternity leave and the enforced separation from their babies, necessitated mainly by financial reasons.

I went back to work four days a week when my first child, an angelically placid baby girl, was six months. It broke my heart and went against all my instincts to leave her. I will never, ever forget that first day I left her in her new childminder’s house, how her huge, trusting brown eyes followed me as I walked away from her.

I drove down the road, pulled into the side and sobbed my heart out. But, like so many other modern mothers, I had no choice. The bottom line was, we needed two incomes to keep our household going, so I had to work. The guilt was suffocating, especially when my little baby realised what was happening every morning and began to cry and cling to me as I left. It just felt so terribly wrong.

A year later, her bouncing baby brother made his entrance to the world. Nobody, not one single person, had warned me how much the second child can turn your world completely upside-down, especially when that child has colic.

When The Bruiser was six months old and it was time to go back to work, wild horses couldn’t have held me back. At that stage, my placid firstborn had morphed into a toddler diva and I realised that staying at home with small children was far from the cushy number I had assumed.

No, it was bloody hard work. And that’s only with two. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like with three or four, never mind eight (aged between five and 23), like O’Callaghan. In her frank and honest interview in a newspaper last Sunday, she says she needs to work because she has eight children, but admits that even if she didn’t have to, she would probably make the selfish decision to work because she loves what she does.

Yesterday afternoon, O’Callaghan phoned TV3’s live Midday show, which was discussing her comments, to say the original headline on the RTÉ website (“Mums should stay at home”) misrepresented her views and that working outside the home is “all about personal choice”.

My children are happy with their childminder, who is a kind, caring mum herself. They have great fun in her home playing with other children and are very well looked after, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that given the choice, they would prefer to be at home with me.

I, on the other hand, would probably crack up. Like O’Callaghan, I love what I do and even if we could afford it, I think I would chose to keep working.

Depending on which side of the fence you are on, there are studies to back you up. There are studies that show children who spend all day in childcare have higher levels of stress and are more aggressive than those cared for at home. And there are studies that show the opposite – that kids in daycare do better academically and socially than those who stay at home.

Alison Clarke-Stewart, professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California, is regarded as one of the world’s leading childcare and parenting experts. She believes it’s the quality not the type of childcare that’s important. If parents give their children concentrated time and attention in the evenings and at weekends, the children are just as well-adjusted as those cared for fulltime at home, she says.

I’d like to think that’s true. Like most working mums, I wear my guilt every day like a hairshirt. It’s a difficult choice that most modern mothers will have to face at some stage. For many, there really is no choice: economic circumstances dictate that the mother’s income is needed to run the household. For those mothers who can afford to stay at home but chose to go to work for their own sanity, the guilt is probably even worse than for the rest of us.

And for those who do stay at home, it’s not easy either.