Fear and loathing: what's our problem with mothers and children?

The focus of childcare in Ireland is to get women into the workplace, writes VICTORIA WHITEin an excerpt from her new book

ON MOTHER’S DAYI went to church with my four children, and my autistic-spectrum child insisted on sitting with his brother and their friends. The instinct towards sociability was positive, so I let him, although I knew it could play badly. And indeed it did; very soon he got restless and argumentative. I reached my hand behind me, laid it on him and kept it there for the entire service. I’m not saying he stopped complaining, but he did calm down.

No one taught me to do that. My children have given me healing hands. As the sermon reached the meaning of “mothering” I suddenly realised my outstretched hand said it all.

I have always disliked Mother’s Day, and I never celebrated it with my own mother. This no doubt dates back to a terrible event in my own childhood when I bought my mother a horrible brooch inscribed with the word “Mother” and she said it was horrible. I still remember my father’s intake of breath.

But this Mother’s Day things were different. My daughter arrived downstairs, purple with pride, and produced a home-made card from behind her back that read “Happy Mumer’s Day”. It was my turn to turn purple with pride.

I don’t know why I’m so interested in children. I had, after all, a mother who told me often – when I was a child – that she didn’t like children. This may well be at the heart of it; I still feel the outrage of a child at that comment. And my father, although busy and distant, always treated me like a full human being. He would ask my advice.

I had in my parents an unusual combination of a father who built my sense of my own importance and a mother who did not. This is probably the rocket fuel in my concern for children’s rights. It has become clear to me that children’s rights are the women’s rights of today. Theirs is the area of rights that is in sudden and dramatic evolution. Just as our concept of womanhood exploded 30 or 40 years ago, so today our concept of childhood is exploding.

Just as with women’s rights, our understanding of children’s rights has been a dawning realisation. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has its roots in Eglantyne Jebb’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924 but not adopted by the UN General Assembly until 1989. Ireland ratified it in 1992.

The wide-ranging convention establishes human rights for children on a par with those of adults but understands them as needing “special care and assistance”. Where possible, it says, they should be brought up in a family, by their own parents. The “best interests of the child” must be “a primary consideration” in “all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies.” The convention is a bar the nations of the world have been trying to clear ever since. In 2006 Ireland was still being criticised by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for having failed fully to incorporate the convention into domestic law. But in truth there has been a sea change in the importance given to children’s rights since Ireland’s agreement to ratify in 1992.

Women of my generation have become mothers at a time when the economy demanded they be workers and child-rearers, and the two demands were frequently on a collision course. There is, in truth, a tension between the perceived rights of women and the perceived needs of children. The two “rights” revolutions, those of women and those of children, are often in open conflict.

Every effort is made to pretend this is not so, with the result that elements of children’s needs are often officially denied. Even some of the progressive measures for children introduced in this country have to be examined in case they are really about getting mothers into the workplace.

The National Children’s Strategy (2000) records the “recent development of a constricted labour supply has implications for the economic well-being of the country”. What possible place has this statement in a strategy for the well-being of children? Well, you can argue that the country can’t produce enough wealth for the children if the women aren’t working. But you can argue back that there are different kinds of wealth, and different kinds of poverty.

Just because the National Children’s Strategy reports on the “benefits of early childhood programmes” for children, don’t whip your children out of the kitchen to the nearest preschool.

The strategy takes its information from the Expert Working Group on Childcare’s National Childcare Strategy (1999), which namechecks Schweinhart and Weikart, who in turn take their information from the Perry Preschool Project, which was set up in the US in the early 1960s to report exclusively on children born in poverty. Remember that: the childcare strategy was specifically addressing the needs of women in the workforce, women whose children are usually not among the most disadvantaged.

It is clear that children from disadvantaged homes benefit enormously from preschool programmes. The less your home offers you, the more you will benefit from preschool. The more your home offers, the less you will benefit from preschool. The National Economic and Social Forum’s Early Childhood and Education document (2005) clearly states that the benefits of preschool to advantaged children will be less, if any, than for disadvantaged children, because their home life is “closer to the quality of childcare they receive in preschool”.

I’m not saying children from advantaged homes shouldn’t go to preschool. It may do them some good and is unlikely to do them any harm. It might mean a child with special needs will be diagnosed earlier. And there’s hardly a parent who won’t appreciate a few hours’ grace. But the strongest reason for advantaged children to go to preschool is that their presence will provide disadvantaged children with a much better environment than they would have without them.

The idea gaining ground that you cannot raise your preschool child at home because you do not have the expertise is ideologically driven. It relates to our boom-time economic need to professionalise child rearing so that well-educated women can stay at work. From the point of view of growth-motivated economists it is all about more “productivity”. For some women’s organisations it’s been about getting women into jobs because that’s what’s good for them.

This means denying totally the need for any skill on the part of the parent. At times it goes as far as to imply that parents have no skills for educating preschool children.

But Fergus Finlay, director of the children’s charity Barnardos, says what he needs most of all are “skilled mothers. Effective mothers. The most important thing in a child’s life is the love of a mother,” says Finlay. “The less pressure there is on her, and the less stress and strain, the better. If we really want the future to be better for all of us we need to discharge the debt we have to motherhood. We need to help mothers to be the best they can be.”

I tell him that some would say this kind of talk gets in the way of women’s success in work outside the home. “Everybody has to strike their own balance,” he says. “If career matters, it matters.” As to the argument that parenting is a waste of a woman’s education, Finlay says it’s “nonsense”. “The link between mother’s education and that of the kids is crystal clear. Children whose mothers don’t have education start secondary school two years behind those whose mothers are educated.” The disadvantage continues through the educational cycle. Nor does this mean it is a waste for an educated woman to work outside the home. It just means all those hours we educated mothers spend helping with homework really matter.

Motherhood is never seen as active, skilful or effective. It is in the absence of any sense of the value of the work of motherhood that recommendations can be made stating exactly equal amounts should be done by male and female partners, regardless of the skills they have. It is in fact vitally important that the best skills on offer to a child should be the best available in the family: in crude terms, if mammy can read and daddy can’t, mammy should supervise the homework.

In Children First, the childcare expert Penelope Leach makes a fascinating point about creches that has spent more than a decade lodged at the back of my mind. She says the "relative impersonality [of the creche] may be more important to some parents than they themselves realise": they feel less guilty than they would leaving their child with a minder who is just like them except she is with the child all day, while they are not; and also less fearful that the child will have a minder whose bond with him challenges his bond with his parents. Indeed, I remember one of my friends telling me she deliberately chose a creche for her baby because she didn't want the sole influence of another woman on her child.

Babies and small children respond to individuals, not to a business model, and they can’t put that responsiveness on ice for the working day. Best practice in creches is to put in place measures that mimic a good family set-up, like appointing a “key worker” to interact with each child and liaise with the parents.

The bulk of our childcare was not designed with the child as its focus. The first major drive to provide childcare places in Ireland was the Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme (2000-2006) supported by the EU to get women into the workplace. It was administered by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which, as Barbara Gavagan of the Fatima Mansions childcare centre says, has “nothing remotely got to do with children”. Funded to the tune of €500 million, its aim of creating 31,800 childcare places was exceeded. This was succeeded by the National Childcare Strategy 2006-2010, which was given State funding of €575 million. It aimed to create another 50,000 childcare places, including 5,000 afterschool and 10,000 preschool.

It’s all been about creating as many places as possible in as short a time as possible so that as many women as possible can get out and work.

Do we in Ireland have a particular dislike for children? Our recent history would seem to suggest so. Maybe the extent to which children were abused in Ireland was no greater than elsewhere, but we specialised in institutional abuse because we specialised in institutionalisation. Long after the UK had abandoned the institutional care of orphans we were still putting them in orphanages and industrial schools.

Why did we have such confidence in institutions? Have we some terrible fear of the influence of the mother? We were also out on our own in our willingness to institutionalise mothers. Asylums for “fallen” women were not an Irish or Catholic idea and were originally meant to “rehabilitate” prostitutes, but in Ireland they became the prison-like Magdalen laundries where women considered deviant in any way were incarcerated, often for life. Long after the practice was abandoned elsewhere, Ireland’s laundries continued.

Why did we need to shut these women away? It seems as if we feared the potentially destabilising force of their sexuality, of which children were proof. Do we fear children because we fear sex? Do we fear children because we fear mothers?

This is an edited extract from Mother Ireland: Why Ireland Hates Motherhoodby Victoria White, published by Londubh, €14.99

Why I wrote the book

When I had my first child I realised that I was faced with the biggest job I’d ever have to do, and I was stunned by how little this work was valued or recognised. I was expected to minimise it or pretend it wasn’t happening. Other things I did were much easier and acclaimed, but doing my “real job” was like going on holiday in comparison with motherhood – though, admittedly, as a journalist I had a nice job.

As a middle-class woman in the 1980s I feared pregnancy as marking the end of my life. Life was a lifelong Leaving Certificate, and I was successful in those terms.

Until that point I was a classically formed feminist, but I began to question the road map it had given me. I don’t question much of what it gave me: I don’t question equal pay and access to contraception, for example, or maternity leave. There were many things in the women’s movement that influenced and paved the way for me. But we must all the time question and revivify the model.

In the 1980s there was an exponential growth in world productivity. There was a huge focus on the production of goods and services, and that became embedded in our feminism. The equality agenda was also used by the capitalist agenda.

In Ireland we have always had a very strong tradition of single women achieving. We have a strong tradition of celibacy and a cultural fear of pregnancy, which relates to our history of poverty, and that affected the version of feminism we were given.

I have no time for the idea that there are at-home mothers versus at-work mothers. All mothers are both at home and at work, and I don’t think mothers have much time for that debate either. I really hate being described as a full-time mother, because every mother is full time, even if you’re working a 16-hour day outside the home.