Hi Everyone
I am the person who wrote the Huffington Post article.
(pause. wait for shower of stones to cease. continue.)
It's great to read all of these responses and of course I'm sorry that many of you felt angry about what I had to say... unfortunately, this is a discussion which it is pretty impossible to have without people feeling criticised in their choices.
I can't respond to everything that has been said here but I will have a go at a few points.
As has been pointed out by a few of you, the article was a letter to Nick Clegg. If I'm 'attacking' anyone, it's him, not working mothers. I feel constantly annoyed that leading policy makers don't seem to acknowledge the importance of the first 2-4 years of life. Clegg's suggestion that two year olds could be 'educated' is a good example of this. This shows a total lack of understanding of child development and needs. But comments such as Clegg's are 'anti women', 'anti mothers', because they make women feel that their time at home is not time well spent, and even perhaps inadequate that they are not 'educating', 'stimulating' their babies and small children enough.
Women talk about being bored with childcare and say that they are not using their brains. But perhaps some of this feeling of boredom comes from the sense that what they are doing is not of any value? And that they can easily be replaced by someone less academically qualified. But if we really start to understand child development and psychology, perhaps we can see that what we are doing when we spend time with our children is actually quite complex, fascinating, and valuable beyond measure.
There is always a lot of talk about choice and if women here feel that their decision to return to work was truly a free one in every sense of the word then I applaud it. But in a culture that gives so many negative messages about motherhood and time spent with children, we perhaps have to consider how this backdrop informs our choices, at a deep level.
There wasn't space in the article to cover every base and every choice. I used the word mother but of course if we want to be PC we can say 'primary care giver', this could be an adoptive parent, a grandparent, a dad, or anyone else who loves the child, is not doing it for money, and is with them for the long haul. Age is also a factor - a small baby in full time nursery care is a different proposition to a 2 year old who goes to a one to one childminder a couple of days a week.
But the bottom line is that babies and small children need focused attention from someone who loves them. I do like to think of myself as a feminist - I seem to remember Germaine Greer defined this once as being a woman first, before anything else. I'm interested in the idea of empowering women to reclaim motherhood, and to see childcare as a challenging, stimulating and important job. Clegg's policy and words are detrimental to women and mothers, in my view. I also think we need to consider children's rights here as well. We often hear the phrase ' a happy mother = a happy child', but this is never reversed - a happy child = a happy mother. Perhaps we need to think more holistically about our choices and see that a handful of years taking time out from a career to do the incredibly important work of raising our children, is valuable to society, and valuable to our children.
Well, I will run for cover now.
x
Here's another post I wrote about the value of a mother:
mamamule.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/reclaiming-motherhood-what-is-value-of.html
(yes, i write a blog, yes, i do it when my kids are asleep, etc) x