Is the 'care' in childcare just an oxymoron?

You can learn a lot from children's rhymes. For example, that innocuous playground game, Ring-a-rosies, is all about the plague in London in 1600.

The "ring of rosies" refers to the red rash that erupted in a circle on the skin, while the "pocket full of posies" is an allusion to herbs used by people in an attempt to keep the illness at bay. While I doubt that it will have quite the same longevity, I was intrigued by a little rhyme I heard being sung by eight­year-olds in a playground recently.

Happy Birthday to me

I'm a hundred and three

I still go to playschool

and I miss my mommy.

My mommy's at work.

She fired a jerk.

She hired a monkey

to do my homework.

No doubt Seamus Heaney can sleep easy in his bed, but there is a very interesting vision of life in 21st-century Ireland in this little sing-song chant. Mommy's at work, and the child, even at 103, is still lonely at playschool. Mother is hiring and firing, including a monkey to help with the child's homework.

No doubt the little misses who came up with this rhyme would raise their eyes wearily to heaven at any attempt to overanalyse their masterpiece. However, you don't have to be a cultural anthropologist to see that massive social change in the role of women is reflected in their playground rhyme.

Allegedly, it was being out on the election trail in Kildare and Meath that finally made the politicians wake up to the fact that life is, well, hell, for a lot of people in the commuter belt. Rising at dawn, dropping children to creches, commuting grimly into Dublin, home in time to put cranky children to bed and a frantic few hours' work around the house, and then it all starts again.

And the solution to all this is childcare. Whatever happened to the vision of working fewer hours, of having time to know people at the school gates, of being with children when they are not bleary with sleep?

Whatever happened to the idea of living life, not just enduring it? How come we are allegedly better off as a nation than we ever were, yet so many women (and a lot of men) feel they are going to crack from tiredness and stress?

I don't envy Seamus Brennan his task of attempting to come up with some equitable way of helping people with childcare, because there are so many conflicting needs to satisfy. The Celtic Tiger needs constant supplies of workers to keep it purring. However, harassed two-income families feel that politicians have no understanding of their attempt to balance work and life, and are angry about the minimal State investment in childcare.

Another need is to help people caught in the poverty trap, especially lone parents, to access paid employment which will allow them some measure of dignity, but also allow them to be effective parents.

Then there are the diminishing band of parents who want to work full-time in the home, and deeply resent any kind of tax-breaks or perks for people that will disadvantage still further single-income families.

There is also another consideration, which usually gets pushed to the back of the queue, which is about the kind of society we want. Do we want a society where people are valued only for the paid work they do, and where children spend most of their time in small herds, and see their parents primarily at weekends? This kind of lifestyle has a major impact on communities. Never has Ireland had so many homes empty all day.

We are horrified at the conditions elderly people endure in nursing homes, but the fact is that there will be more people in nursing homes if everyone is pushed out to work. The media focus tends to be on people with very small children, because there is something heartrending about buckling a baby into a car seat at the crack of dawn to spend her day in childcare.

However, slightly later on, when children are older, the question of elder care looms. The definition of middle age is when you are constantly torn between the needs of the generations older and younger than you. Many elderly people who could be maintained at home through a combination of family and neighbourly care and State-provided home helps are being forced into institutional homes because people simply do not have the time to care in that way any more.

Apparently there are six options under discussion to help parents, and they range from payments that would only benefit parents in paid work, to creche subsidies, to greatly enhanced child benefit or direct childcare payments to all parents.

There are also proposed systems of refundable tax credits, which basically means that you get relief on tax if you are in that bracket, and a direct payment from the Government if you are not earning enough income to qualify for tax relief.

The most equitable would seem to be some combination of direct payment and tax credits.

Certainly, nothing should be done to disadvantage those who work at home, for several reasons. They provide far more than just a service to their own children. They are often a resource for others out at work, both in terms of emergency and casual childcare, and in helping to maintain some semblance of community in the areas where we live.

There is nothing as bleak as a housing estate that is empty from 8am to 7pm every day. However, lone parents may need special help. Yet should it not be recognised that parenting is also valuable work? Should we not be emphasising education and part-time work for lone parents, rather than seeing them as economic units that we wish to prevent being a drain on the State?

Perhaps, too, we should ask what children would like. Would they like their parents to be helped financially to spend more time away from them, or to spend more time with them? Maybe when it comes to Cabinet deliberations, my little chanting bunch from the playground and their peers could be called upon to give some input.

Or is the "care" in childcare just an oxymoron?