In The Times today: Blind feminism has hurt our children

[twelveyeargap]

Blind feminism has hurt our children

Because he wouldn't have written it if he hadn't wanted to sell more copies of his book. But I do agree with Caligula. Oliver James is not someone whom i regard as a credible source of psychological, intellectual, hairdressing, social or emotional knowledge.

its the use of the term "retard" to describe someone whose opinion is not the same as your own (or indeed mine) that i find offensive.

its a bit like calling a footballer who misses a penalty a "spaz"

sorry if i am over reacting but i find it incredibly rude and offensive.

I saw that Fatty, and thought "Oh no, not again ". I wish people would just think before using words like this.

madamez - just having an opinion different to yours does not make them 'retards'. A really poor choice of words i think.

having read the unicef report and living in the UK teaching kids who lived in ways I had never seen before - and that compares to teaching indigineous children here in Aus - I agree it is not about daycare but an evolving societal attitude that seems prevade so much of the UK.

A lot of people could not understand why I wanted to raise our children here in Aus rather than in the UK - we lived in a fab village and had a great life but there was something about it that made me want to raise my children here in Aus. ( we didn't make the unicef report because we did not have enough data) I believe my children have a 'better' quality of life here in Aus than they would have been able to have in the UK. That is not to say that Aus is without its problems - just means the choices we are able to make as a family are wider than the choices we would have as a family in the UK.

can we please not use the word retard. Good grief what on earth is that word doing being used on here.

Yes, this whole 'Affluenza' thing. Sorry, but it's a crock. A whole book that could be summed up in one sentence: I'm jealous of the rich guys, and I wish I could be just like them.

Yawn.

Most of us would be happy with health and a decent living space.

Having calmed down and come back to this thread, I bloody wish OJ et al would direct their pontifications directly towards fathers.

Come to that (MI climbs back on usual hobbyhorse) I wish the bloody fathers' groups would do the same.

I do more or less agree with the gist of OJ's article (NOT the title). And I very much enjoyed "They F* you up". And I agree with quite a lot of his Affluenza stuff.

But I am very wary of the implications which he seems to draw, and which other people draw from his writing, about the role of mothers, even when he doesn't say it explicitly. He does leave a very strong implication that life would be better if women would just dust off their housecoats and get back into the kitchen and playroom.

Oh, and of coures, "retard" should be a banned word on mumsnet. Didn't spot it earlier in the thread but am and

I think some of you are really paranoid about this.

OJ is not in favour of women being pushed back into the kitchen. He has explicitly said so in the past. He has said, and he says it pretty clearly in this article, that he thinks both parents should spend less time at work and more time with children and that we should develop a working modus vivendi which promotes this.

I think there's a kneejerk response of "OMG he wants Kinder, Kirche, Kuche for women because he says he wants parents to spend more time with kids". He doesn't. He's never said anything even remotely akin to that afaik. But there seems to be a version of feminism which is suspicious of anything which questions our workaholic culture.

It's true many of us feminists do have a knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion of Kinder-Kuche-Kirche. Because the media, and policmakers, and many many people, invariably translate "gender-neutral" issues about childcare and anything about flexible working patterns or working hours or work-life balance into issues about women, and specifically about mothers.

For example, look up any discussion about flexible working or parental leave in the media and in government documents and it mutates, along the way, into a discussion about women. Time and time again.

if OJ wants to get us feminists on side he has to be a bit more proactive about it.

Who is "us feminists"?

I consider myself a feminist, and I'm on his side!

I can see that and I kind of agree. but it is such a middle class view on a wider set of problems (nothing wrong with it either). However I think that working or retraining to get a better job is paramount to escape poverty and emargination. therefore bashing the government attempts to provide affordable childcare for those who can't afford to work partime or who don't have a partner/family to share childcare with is not very progressive, ime.

"some of us feminists"

I don't think he's bashing the government's attempts to provide childcare though.

He's certainly bashing the government for insisting that paid childcare is the only valid method of living though. Which imo is fair enough.

In challenging the workaholic culture (which I would also like to challenge) I think it's worth remembering that it's men who are working particularly long hours. UK men work the longest hours of all European men. UK fathers of young children work the longest hours of all, longer than UK men who don't have young children.

And UK women work relatively short hours in paid workcompared to women in many other European countries.

In which case, any focus on the long hours culture should be starting with the men, and the fathers.

A significant proportion of the budget has been wasted on the provision of group day care ? including expensive and unnecessary buildings.

wasted????

I think that expat. A total crock. He has hit on something that is going on in society, but the conclusions he is drawing about why this is happening is all wrong.

I could get a mindblowing, high flying job and be less well off than my grandparents. "Affluenza"??

Listen OJ, I have reached a point where I am satisfied with living in a flat because that is what policy makers have decided our generation must do to preserve the 80% of this country that is green space, for the likes of the CPRE living in chocolate box villages.

People much poorer than me live in far worse conditions and with less to live on each month.

The biggest myth of all of this tripe is that we have brought it on ourselves by greed. If you had told an accountant 20 years ago that it was greedy to have a house and garden rather than a flat to bring their children up in they would have looked at you like you were crazy.

The biggest myth in this society is that poor people should be grateful for the handouts they are given. They shouldn't be grateful, they should be angry that they have no other choice. And I think that the increasing violence and despair amongst them is the first sign that this is starting to happen.

Women need to work at the moment to make ends meet. Daycare is the only cost effective option for them, no matter what the harm to the children. Change that and you will be halfway there.

Amen, cloudhopper!

To me, a lot of times, it seems like we learned nothing from the Victorian era.

There seems to be this pervasive mentality that if you're poor, it's because you deserve it or brought it on yourself somehow, and it's always 100% possible to not be poor anymore.

So OJ can moan on and on about how hard done by folks are that they don't have the lastest mobile phone.

Most of us have our nose too close to the grindstone to even dream up that sort of tripe.

There it happens again (back on my usual hobbyhorse

last sentence of Cloudhopper's post. "Women need to work to make both ends meet. Daycare is the only cost effective option for them"

This is straight back to making it an issue just about women again. Why doesn't that sentence say "Both parents have to work full time to make ends meet"?

Agree Fennel, the emphasis on work life balance being a "woman's issue" just reaffirms the idea that women don't have the right to have an equal place in the workplace with men. It accepts that long hours and presenteeism is a necessity for senior jobs and therefore ensures the glass ceiling remains pretty impenetrable by most mothers.

fennel, the right-on left-wing activist in me is singing inside when you say that. Yes, it is both parents theoretically. I am overjoyed that someone still thinks that, because I would love it to be the case.

But on a practical level, it is the woman. Most women have more of an inclination to stay at home, the means to do so (maternity leave, acceptability of part time work etc). They have the default responsibility.

I am much more career driven than my husband, but he could never stay at home with the kids. He would work at a loss rather than do that, believe me.

So even though you are right, and even though technically that is the case, in practice it is still the woman. We are light years away from solving problem 1 - how do we share the responsibility with men. We could be closer to solving problem 2 - affordable childcare.

Totally agree with everything you say about greed cloudhopper. A modest three bed house with a garden in a crap area, isn't an insane greed-crazed aspiration. Or wasn't, thirty years ago. Even for quite poor people.

But affordable childcare isn't sharing the care with men. It doesn't really solve that equality issue, imo.