"It may be better news for women... to look after their own children and fit jobs into the child's day"

[SleepWhenImDead]

So says Jill Kirby, director of the Conservative think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies in this BBC article.

Seriously, what planet is this lady on? She makes out like it's a NEW idea for women to either not to work or to work hours to limit the amount of childcare that's needed. Well done Jill, we'd never thought of that before you suggested it!

I'm going to be hard hit from these cuts to public sector, I'm currently on maternity leave but due to be made redundant anyway. The public sector is the place I'd need to get a job, and get child-friendly hours. DOes this Jill think we get to CHOOSE these things, like a job is something you do for fun to avoid looking after your own children?! Think I might as well give up even hoping for a job and soon we'll lose our child benefit as well. I'm attacked on all directions!

Xenia - i have "given up" my career (for now anyway) and am certainly not stupid.
dh is wonderful to me and vice versa
we have one account, his salary is paid in and effectively i manage the household finances.
i don't want a boring job that fits in with school hours/holidays, i'd rather spend my time doing other stuff.
i don't want to go back to my old career, it is too full on with too much travelling. dh works long hours and travels too, our children would not see either of us. so i am happy to stay at home, whilst dh is in the job he is in anyway.

does that really make me stupid?

many women are entrepreneurs and run businesses. Plenty of them are in favour of much of what the Government is doing. They have hardly started on what they must do but it is a start. It's a good start so far.

No, I didn't mean some women were stupid in that sense. I was just really surprised Q who outearns her husband seemed to be behaving in some kind of Steford wife scenario in a cake shop and in an inequitable way. By all means each put yourself out for the other in relationships - it's what I hope most of us do male and female but never let that just be a woman's thing. Plenty of men are the same thankfully.

Your loyalty in the face of the evidence is admirable, Xenia.

Xenia, I do not think the government is attempting any kind of pro-women-in-the-long-run social engineering here, but if you want to believe that's the case, even though you seem to be against social engineering, well and good.

Xenia: 'We need to stamp these women right out surely, make it our life's work to do so. They have no place in modern Britain.'???

Do you mean this? I agree with you that we should all be tough on sexism and tough on the causes of sexism, but stamp us out?

There is no one-size-fits-all. Live and let live, say I. Respect people's choices.

I would be interested to know if Jill Kirby gets paid 80% of what her male colleagues are paid.

But if a choice is political, if all these women scrubbing the loos whilst their husbands swan around in offices mean other women who are trying to work are damaged, then it is not simply a personal decision to be a housewife but a decision with ramifications for other women too.

Anyway women succeed well if tax rates are low and commerce is largely left alone so that free markets can operate. The better conditions for that are usually under a Conservative Government. It is the natural party for women.

Quite so. As Christmas is the natural choice for turkeys.

what? the natural party for women? are you for real? so am i biologically programmed to vote tory?

I do see what Xenia is saying, we do ourselves and our daughters no favors when we give it all up to look after our children.

The trouble is when you look at the alternatives, generally pretty poor childcare no matter what you pay or no children it's not great is it ?

However, my husband is presenting tomorrow a seminar about small business during recession and the truth is that women do usually start out on their own to fit around children and this may surprise you but only 0.06% of the 204,361 new businesses registered with HMRC in the first quarter of 2010 have gone into liquidation, in normal times 40% go under in the first year and of those remaining 25% go in the second year.
So maybe it's time we start doing it for ourselves instead of lining other peoples pockets with our talents, including the nurseries.

Mamatomany: 'I do see what Xenia is saying, we do ourselves and our daughters no favors when we give it all up to look after our children.'

I don't. I think children like it if their parents look after them. We're not giving it all up, we're achieving a work-home balance that works for us.

Again - repect women's choices. That's true freedom.

And let us not forget that it was never the choices of women, historically, that led to discrimination either in pay or in being forced away from the workplace, nor was it the choices of women that led to us being defined as chattel -- the turkey analogy is superb.

Quattrocento - you are reading way too much into that granola bar. Marriage/coupledom/family require constant compromise in order to function. You cannot always have the cake you want - and, most importantly, you don't care that you can't because the whole is so much more important and interesting than the detail.

I didn't choose many aspects of my life because DP brought a lot of constraints with him. But I have a fabulous life nonetheless, that I have made within the constraints that are non-negotiable. Of course sometimes I make compromises when I am with DP, as he does, and the children do. That's what makes our family function.

to all the single mums who are asking what we are meant to do i think the idea is we're meant to go out and find a man, marry him, give him a tax break and look after our kids and do voluntary work.

though obviously the ideal would be for us to just disappear in a cloud of smoke seeing as they're ignoring our existence totally.

other than conforming to the social engineering policy we're meant to get poorer and more disadvantaged to serve as a deterent to any other woman who dares to think of leaving her partner or not getting married to a man who makes her pregnant.

women must be terrified into not ending up like us

evil thought warning - if all the married women become sahm's maybe there would be enough childcare places for single mum's?

my son goes to school next year, 60 children in the intake for reception, so 60 in each year group. how many afterschool club places? 16. for a school with 420 kids.

Xenia,

Not desperately keen on 'stamping out women' that don't agree with you, why not stamp out their men?

I do agree, though, about the triteness of simply 'accepting choice'. Others' choices affect us all. How our kids grow up to understand gender roles isn't a private issue, it's a societal one.

But the system is in many ways shitty, and I see how blaming people (not just women) for the choices they make within it helps. I've always felt the key point in many friendships I have with parents is not where they end up on the SAHM-24/7 working scale, but where they start. If the feeling is that the discussion went form 'let's share childcare equally' and moved because of finances or personal aptitudes then fair enough. Too often, though, it doesn't, it starts with 'one of us should do childcare-which one?', which often becomes 'who earns less?' (which is not really sensible-the decision is about whether joint income after childcare meets needs, there is no reason why that should be one person working rather than both working for reduced wages).

sorry, I can't see that should be

Should a man who chooses to work 70 hours a week should be stamped out as well because he demonstrates it is possible so why can't all the others do it? Surely the decisions of alpha males have a lot to do with the current sad state of affairs?

I have particular views about community run out of school clubs. We knew we needed f/t after school care and chose a school on that basis, as families with two f/t working parents wanting five days a week automatically got places. Fair enough, you might think.

We then got outmanoeuvred by a bunch of SAHM and very p/t (eg two days a week school hours only) working parents who suddenly seemed to be able to change the rule book, and apparently wanted to use it to avoid their own kids. As one of them said to me "It's just so nice to have some time to yourself". This meant the facility was rapidly oversubscribed, and we were all rationed to 2-3 days a week with less than a week's notice, which meant the f/t working people couldn't use it, causing enormous problems locally.

This clique also brought in a reduced fee for people using it just for an hour after school, rather than until 6 as usual, which meant places were blocked for other parents but the club was not washing its face financially, and very nearly went under. Various attempts were made to wrest back control of the committee but rather dark derring do meant that proper democratic procedures were not followed but it was hard to anything about it.

In the end this sort of abuse was one of the reasons we stopped using that school.

But now I have got that off my chest, my real point is this. What is the difference to a child between the WOHM and SAHM who use the same childcare facility for different reasons (professional v personal)? Answer is not a lot. Not everyone uses childcare for work purposes.

"families with two f/t working parents wanting five days a week automatically got places. Fair enough, you might think."

why is that fair enough?
why should you get priority over parents working 2 or 3 days/week?

i guess if it was run as a business, it makes more sense to give priority to people using it for all sessions so you get higher overall occupancy = less down time = more profit.

but i don't agree that you should get priority. why do you think you should?

Because they basically hadn't considered the impact of changing the rules on all of the school population. By doing this, they basically not only instantly froze all of us out of the club, but also all the single working mums and dads, and nearly made the club go under financially to boot. I can't see how it's fair on any level to share out days in a way that corresponds with the needs of one particular social group whilst completely ignoring the imperatives of another (especially giving them less than a week's notice). Many people were tearing their hair out, tbh.

BTW I said school hours, 2-3 days a week. If you are working school hours only you don't need the after school club.

ok well then yes i agree with you.
i thought you were saying ft working parents should get priority for childcare places over those only needing 2-3 days/week.

If there's such demand why don't some of the parents seize their chance and run a club themselves?