Selfish parents ruin their children's lives

[HecateQueenOfGhosts]

according to this

What do you think?

Hmm, but I work at home and I can tell you it doesn't mean I can look after DS at the same time. He goes to nursery. If he was running around while I worked, that would be pretty crap childcare IMO. That was what a lot of kids had in the past while their mums took in laundry or piecework. I'm not saying everybody did, I know there were SAHMs but the suggestion that working mothers is some kind of modern evil really annoys me. The vision of a 50s housewife with loads of time for her kids is a mid-20th-century middle-class marketing dream that coincided with labour-saving devices being brought in - so the focus was on women not having to do so much housework. But it has left society with this weird vision that before the liberating 60s, every woman was a sweet, good-natured SAHM and that's why kids were so well-behaved and society was so wonderful.

B.o.l.l.o.c.k.s. Look back at what society was like in Victorian times. Drug abuse, alcoholism, vagrancy, adultery and ruined relationships, crime was rife. And in the past, without good contraception, girls got pregnant out of wedlock ALL THE TIME - generally, their communities forced them to marry whoever the dad was and henceforward to, likely as not, a not very happy married life, but women were just expected to lump that. How is that better for children? It's a myth. People, media and commentators will never tire of nostalgia and wibbling on about how great things were before modern decline - there were satirists in ancient greece who wrote about that very phenomenon fgs.

hat sits on hands and wills herself not to read the Mail coverage of this report...but there's an inevitability about it...she knows she can;t stop herself...

Great post and eloquently put Snowleopard.
As regards nursery v nanny, notyummy, I take it you only have one child.
Eleven years ago, when I went back to work after DD1 was born on a salary of £30,000 or so, her nursery fees were £800 a month. Then I had DD2. Then I had DD3. See where I'm going here?

oh god, hatwoman, just dont look at the DM!

Or maybe I can reproduce it word for word here "Its official: single parents and working mums ARE responsible for all society's evils!"

The report should have highlighted selfish grasping rich people who want to make Britain compete with 3rd world countries, and push us to work harder on less money, while high property prices make them even richer.

We need a proper community.

Why is it useful, though, to compare British children's lives now to British children's lives in the past, and to conclude that they are, overall, better today than in the past?

What matters is whether British children are happier and doing as well as (and hopefully better) than children in other, comparable, developed economies today.

snowleopard, in Lark Rise she describes the chidlren being bunged outside in all weathers to play, while their SAHMs scrubbed the house, did the laundry etc. childcare was different! I am sure my ancestors elder children were caring for teh younger ones, between helping their mother with her work.

Agree, the 1950s housewife is a hideous pipe-dream.

Oh no Anna, the governement doesnt want to do that; if they compared Britain to other countries we might actually realise that people are better off and happier in those countries
then we might start getting treasonable ideas about Madame La Guillotine, and Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Snowleopard, brilliant summary. I work on the history of food and the idea of an idyllic past of mums making apple turnovers while dads earnt a family wage only ever applied to a teeny minority for a very short period - and most of that was miserable. The image totally leaves out poorer families, begging richer ones for their potato peelings.. really happened... as well as the struggle of all the mothers who did waged work.

Now a tart note: the reason THEY get to say all this is because WE keep fighting among ourselves. Everyone here is working their socks off. Nearly all mothers do, whatever their lifestyle choices. And every lifestyle choice has a good side and a bad side for the children involved. As the daughter of an unhappy SAHM mother, I know all about the downside of that. As a WOH mother myself, I also know the downside of that. FGS let's just support each other. And the same goes double for the academics and so-called experts.

good post snowleopard. my mum was a sahm in the 60s and 70s. now I'm sure she was a very good one but the idea that she focused wholly on us kids and gave us some idyllic upbringing while smiling sweetly and wearing ribbons in her hair is rose tinted shite. she shopped, for food, every day. As recently as the 60s there were no such thing as supermarkets and very few people had freezers. ie you went out, (walking, remember - few people had cars) everyday, to the butchers, the greengrocers, and/or the grocers, to get food. then she came home and cooked lunch for my father. she had a crappy top loader washing machine. She boil-washed nappies. She scrubbed the doorstep fgs. No-one scrubs their doorsteps anymore. By the time it got to the 70s, when I was little, she filled the bits and bobs of spare time she had gained through buying a freezer and a washing machine, by doing voluntary work, looking after old people. (oh, and, as an aside, I rarely see my father...) I'd like to know just how this report truly compares this with the modern upbringing.

working class women have always worked

that report attacks everyone, the unmarried, the single parent, women.

shit-on-a-stick, the sky is falling, the sky is falling

utter wank

Nighbynight - I wasn't suggesting the government do it, I was asking why posters on this thread do it .

I really like comparing how children live in other European countries - it's one of my favourite tourist activities .

UNICEF compared uk to ther countries recently. we didn;t come out very well...

No Custy, the report doesn't attack everyone. The report actually attacks women. Only women.

Ladyglencorer...I def see what you mean. Yes I only have one; I do have friends with 2/3, and a couple of them have nannies, but mainly because they are both doctors and are required to work hours nurseries won't do (with DH's either in banking or the Forces, so not always around).

I guess my view is unless you earn over £50k, or have antisocial hours (and have the prospect of earning a lot i.e becoming a consultant, and it makes sense to see your wages disappear to a nanny), I still cant see the financial sense of having a nanny if you possibly avoid it. I pay for 40 hours childcare a week, and it costs me @ £7200. With a sibling discount it would cost me less than £19k to put 3 in nursery, which would be operating on the same ratio as a nanny if she had all three of them anyway.

I seem to remember reading that the 50s housewife dream was a very specific and targeted campaign to get women back into the home after they'd tasted the joys of working during the war - especially in the states (rather splendid book called, I think, Working Girls). First line of defence when unemployment beckons is always to send us back into the kitchen...

I can't really see the link in their research to mothers who work. They have tenuously blamed it for higher rate of marriage break up?????

But there seems no direct link.

Pah. Favourite headlines or what?

Marriage breakdown is all too often portrayed as some kind of evil that ought to be avoided at all costs.

And how short-sighted, as people have pointed out, not to think that through a little further and see that if a woman leaves her marriage it might be for a good reason - perhaps even, just possibly, thanks to being able to support herself, she's able to remove her children from an abusive father.

The implication is that marriage is best, however shit it is for either party or for the kids. That can't be right. Speaking from my own experience, I was thrilled when I heard my parents were separating and I would no longer have to live with my abusive father and have to see him bullying my mum and leering at us. The first thing I said was "what took you so long?" (I was a teenager at the time). My mum was financially independent but the stigma of divorce was a major factor. Good riddance to the sanctity of marriage I say - where the hell this myth comes from that marriage makes people happy, I know not. It's a control system and a social institution like any other and it suits some, but it is not in itself a cure-all.

Good relationships are important and we very much need to teach children about those IMO, but that is not the same thing as marriage. There are many reasons why children of married parents seem to be happier - for example, couples who stay together long enough to get married before having kids are more likely to have a strong and committed relationship. So it might not be the marriage that counts, but the good relationship.

Agree with Abbeylubber, this report bears very little resemblance to the media summaries of it.

The media reporting is indicative of the main problem a vast gap between rich and poor (which is bigger in this country) and stressed adult working lives (long hours culture worse in this country).

We should not let ourselves get distracted by all this waffle in the reporting about the cost of a nanny etc. etc. This is applicable to a minority of households, the richest ones, who are pretty much all right Jack anyway. Certainly they are compared to the kids another poster was talking about, whose only carer is working crappy hours at a local supermarket doing exhausting and annoying work dealing with arsey customers and is finding that the "affordable quality childcare" is all smoke and mirrors. Of course it's not going to leave much energy for lovely cuddly mothering when she gets home, though most do still somehow manage to do this.

And in the time I've taken to neglect my child writing this, the discussion has probably moved on.

I hate the implication that being a working mum is selfish. What about working dads? What about the terrible dameage they have been inflicting on their kids with all those working years?

I wonder if they asked any children any questions about how they felt about their dad having an affair and splitting up their marriage?

I had an idyllic childhood. Dad had a good stable job, mum never worked. We had a lovely big house and big garden. DB and I had private education. We always had a holiday (even if it was usually in the UK).

But looking back my mum was miserable and lonely much of the time. She wanted to work and couldn't. She was always juggling money and doing without so that they could afford the school fees. She made clothes, made all our food, grew all our veg, kept chickens, not because it was a nice middle class occupation, but because she had to.n She did a lot of the gardening and decorating as well as all the normal chores. My idyllic childhood depended entirely on my mother's domestic servitude (and that is not putting it too strongly). And DB and I picked up on our mum's lack of confidence and resentment and it left it's mark. And fwiw our education wasn't all that great either.

There is no such thing as a perfect childhood, or perfect parents. Thank f* for that I say. As long as we do our best that's good enough.

Of course it's utter tosh that women shouldn't work, or that women are in any way more culpable for family breakdown/unhappy children than men - it's unutterable rubbish. (I'm going to read the actual report in a minute to see whether it does actually say that.)

But it is true that children in the UK have lower welfare indicators than children in just about all other Euro countries. That's something worth investigating. Putting our fingers in our ears and repeatedly saying 'Everything's Fine!' when it's plainly not fine is no use.

I'm glad to see that the report puts the emphasis so firmly on income inequality, as others have said. It's all very well for affluent families to chirp happily about the quality of their childcare; they are able to pay through the nose for it. Far too much childcare in the UK - particularly the childcare paid for by those on the lowest wages - is shite. And that does have a terrible impact on children.

The government should pull its finger out to improve minimum childcare standards across the board.

(from the report's summary the UK is
faring exceptionally badly in the well-being of its children. In comparison with 25 European states, using more than
50 different indicators, the UK ranked in 21st place, above the Slovak Republic, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.