When I read that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt wanted to get a million more women (he means mothers) back to work, I thought perhaps he had overdone the sherry. When I saw him later, at the dispatch box, declaring that “almost half of non-working mothers said they would prefer to work if they could arrange suitable childcare”, I concluded he had become slightly unhinged.
When Hunt continued saying that by massively increasing childcare subsidies the Tories were “breaking down the barriers that stop people working”, it was clear that this was the final nail in the coffin for mothers looking after their own children. Indeed, it is the end of an era, an era when babies went from being valued, to being seen as barriers to work.
It seems completely lost on the Chancellor that looking after children, especially pre-school children, is work. It might not be paid, but it’s work. But to Jeremy Hunt and the Tories, babies are barriers to the much greater and honourable pursuit of making money and building careers. And we are talking about babies here, because the childcare subsidy includes 30 hours of “free” childcare to parents of babies from 9 months old, during term-time, from 2025.
Over the course of the last two days, I didn’t see one journalist ask where the evidence is that it is beneficial for young babies to be separated from their mothers for long periods of time. That would be because there is none. But there is plenty of evidence suggesting that it is harmful to young babies to be in institutional care and away from their mothers.
Now, I do want to acknowledge that it is incredibly difficult for a young couple to have a family on a single income. It has become mandatory in the last decade for both mothers and fathers of young children to be working, often full-time, given housing, food and energy costs.
If these huge childcare subsidies (£17.3 billion over the next five years) help families with young children with these expenses, then I am genuinely relieved and happy for them. It was even reported that 6 in 10 women said the high cost of childcare was one reasons for ending a pregnancy. If this measure helps more women to continue their pregnancies, then it is obviously a good thing.
In fact, as the Tories usually target tax payer’s money at older voters, businesses, or indeed anyone but a young family, part of me is happy that this time, young families will have some support. However, there are other ways to organise your tax system so that it does not discriminate against full-time mothers, such as the French system, which significantly reduces the tax burden on families with children meaning children can be cared for at home. This, together with building more houses, would be a much more family friendly system than the UK system, which seeks to separate mothers from young children. But of course a family friendly system does not increase GDP or tax receipts, so why would a government bother with that?
As the Times said in its editorial, “the case for intervention in this broken market is straightforward: affordable childcare makes it easier for parents, particularly mothers, to return to work, in turn boosting GDP and sparing the state from additional spending on other handouts”.
What you do not see mentioned is that this will be good for babies and toddlers, because it will not be. I believe it is cruel to intentionally separate babies from their mothers when other options are available.
In essence, although I understand why at first blush this massive expansion of outsourced childcare might be welcome, it does essentially mark the end of an era, that is of mothers caring for the children at home. Just like it used to be the norm that you would get married before having children as this was considered to be the best environment for the child, mothers raising and caring for their kids themselves was the norm. It was a given, something so obvious that it didn’t need explaining.
Society accepted that women were indispensable as culture makers in the home and unique to their children. Once mothers enter the workplace, they are both dispensable and interchangeable. We can see this by the fact that once you leave your paid employment the company can put out an advertisement to replace you, the very next day. But you will be waiting a long time before your kids start advertising for a new mummy, because they have become bored of the original one. I happen to think that relationships are built by spending time with the person you care for. These days, that makes me a minority.
So, the next time you see a mum out with her toddler, bear in mind she is the last of a dying breed. It is a sad state of affairs that mothers must now work outside the home for the family to survive. It didn’t have to be that way, and something is immeasurably lost by the fact that it has become so. No longer will the norm be for a young child being cared for by the person he or she loves the most in the world – his mum.