"Working for nothing"

[CogitoErgoSometimes]

Probably just me.... but does anyone else get annoyed when a woman in a partnership says 'after I've paid for the childcare there's nothing left out of my wages'? The implication being that childcare is the woman's sole responsibility and that, if she doesn't stay home to do it herself, the cost of hiring someone else to look after the children is entirely hers... even if there is a wage-earning second parent. The conversation then goes on to something like....'I'd be better off if I stopped work'...or ... 'It's hardly worth me going out to work'. As if her contribution is totally negated and her job worthless.

More accurate to say that paying for child care reduces the household income in total. Shared cost, shared responsibility. But no-one ever phrases it that way. Wonder why.

Annie that would be my ideal too. But it would require the entire working world to change from full time (and often long hours) being the norm, to part time being the norm. And it would require someone to be just as likely to get to a senior position if they work part time as if they work full time. I don't see that happening any time soon.

And as snowmama says - even if the world did change in the way I've described, you would still need an equal number of men as women who want to spend more time at home, and an equal number of women as men who want to spend more time at work. And that will only come with changing social models/advertising/all the other influences.

Bonsoir but isn't it possible that the reason you find offices dull, and family life great, is because that's how you were socialised? So much of our characters, and our likes and dislikes, is due to our upbringing and influences.

LOL at "that is how you were socialised". Not sure how many children are brought up in offices!

Oh Bonsoir, I sense I may need to step away from this conversation now.

1. I don't believe that women are intrinsically anything tbh.

1. Pursuit of fun, is possible however you live your life. If you have never come accross any women who have been financially screwed in one way or another by being a SAHM - you live in a rarified bubble indeed.

1. The "Not sure how many children are brought up in offices" - suggests you have quite spectacularly missed minipies point.

Have you never come across fathers who have lost relationships with their children because of their mothers? Life is full of risks and I think it would be immensely boring to live your life as an exercise in risk-avoidance. But I acknowledge that there are lots of boring people out there who project their own desire for a quiet semi in the suburbs, two dull stable jobs, a crèche and a pension onto the rest of the population

Indeed it is a beautiful, exciting, dangerous world out there...we should live it.

... yet the the predominant risk that women are expected to take is give up their job (and access to many other options and risks in life), to live pretty much the life you have described with only one salary supporting the family instead of two...still not weighing up as a top option for me.

Similarly, Bonsoir, you are projecting a love of being at home with the children and a dislike of being at work onto women. I hate being a SAHM and love being at work. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to traditional gender roles.

I'm a single parent with a full-time job and the one thing I've realised from my own situation is that haemorrhaging your salary into childcare is not a short-term sacrifice that way many people keep pointing out. If you work a 'typical' 9-5, you will need some form of childcare until your child is 15 (not a legal requirement I know, but this age is based on govt and NSPCC guidelines).

When your child starts school, there are still 14 weeks of school holidays to cover, and unless you are one of the few people who manage to hold down jobs that coincide with school hours, there is also wraparound care to consider. I work 9-5 and overtime is done at home, so I don't work long hours. I was horrified to discover that even once my 2 children started school it was still going to cost me somewhere in the region of £6000 per year in childcare! (I rely on professional childcare as I have no family and my friends all work).

Families lucky enough to be able to call on family or friends for childcare will usually be able to balance jobs and family life more effectively than those relying on paid staff, not just because of financial reasons but also because grandparents will look after a child recovering from D&V for example, whereas a CM or nursery will not. This is why, out of women with children who work, 4 out of 5 of them are doing it with family/friends-based childcare.

I would hazard a guess then that a lot of (unwilling) SAHMs are in that position because they don't have family to help out and professional childcare costs over a period of 15 years are staggering (about £105,000 in my case) regardless of whether they are coming out of the woman's salary alone or the joint family pot. I suspect that if childcare was free or at least tax deductible, there would be a huge leap in women working, particularly among married women who previously wouldn't be eligible for financial help under existing WTC rules.

One of the reasons why childcare costs are considered a woman's responsibility is, IMO, due to the government's treatment of single parents. In most cases, residency usually goes pretty much to one person (nearly always the mother). If that single mother works, childcare has to come out of her income (even if subsidised by WTC). Even if she receives maintenance the cost of childcare is not included in that, so the father has what is, in effect, free full-time childcare while the woman has all the domestic/family responsibility and all the childcare costs. This simply reinforces the notion that childcare (whether professional or carried out by a parent) is a woman's responsibility even among married couples.

Sorry - I forgot to refresh. That post would be a lot more relevant many posts back. The thread has moved on significantly since the posts I read earlier.

As you were...

Sunshine - that post would be relevant wherever it was in this thread! Bloody hell on those figures!

Really strong point about societal expectation and systems maintaining the expectation that childcare remains the woman's responsibility, whatever the situation.

Sunshine- but isn't the point on the maintanance payments that they are too low altogether. I mean if they were tied to formal childcare expenses then if you stopped working your earned income would go down, and so would the maintenance payments.

(sunshine - I don't mean yours, I mean one's anyone's iykwim...)

Thanks snowmama The figures make me a bit as well and very wistful for what I could have spent the money on (I should point out that in my case 55% of that amount is paid for out of WTC). I don't begrudge it though as I have to say that my CM and nursery are so incredibly wonderful that I would happily pay them more if I could afford it.

Himalaya I totally agree with you about maintenance being set insultingly low to many single parents. I'd like to see childcare costs included in maintenance payments as an additional factor, separate to 'cost of keeping' IYSWIM. A bit like the child element and the working families childcare elements of tax credits - the former is based on the number of children you have and the latter on the amount you are spending on childcare.

As with CSA payments, you could possibly reduce amounts if the father pulled his weight in terms of childcare, though to save abuse of this I would prefer that to be a claim-back process rather than assumed up-front.

This may cause a clash between WTC Childcare element and my style of maintenance payments, but I'm sure an intelligent society could work a way around this. At least it would point out to NRPs that they have a huge advantage with their XPs providing childcare for them and they should try to compensate for that. It would also go some way toward lessening the vitriol often aimed at working single parents because we can get WTC Childcare while couples often can't.

When dh and I started our family we knew that we would be working parents and we knew that childcare would be expensive. Our income after childcare did drop but I don't recall calculating the proportion of dh's or my salary that the childcare would cost, and I certainly didn't think it was my responsibility. We also found the costs once the children went to school didn't go down nearly as much as we expected, and that life got very complicated.

The whole childcare WOH/ SAH thing
is just really hard. There's no such thing as free childcare - someone's always paying for it - whether it's the parent/s giving up/cutting back work, the state, the employer (eg with maternity pay) or the grandparents stepping up. And as many have said on here it only gets harder and more complicated as they get older.

How do you share those costs fairly, for the best for kids, parents and society?

I am not sure what the right answer is But I don't think there is an obvious one which only 'the patriarchy' is standing in the way of.

I do think that if more dads did more childcare and more mums refused to give up on their careers that would help. It would help to have a critical mass of parents at work making it more flexible and a critical mass of dads at baby/toddler groups/school gates etc...

I know that when I had DS1 I felt I lost my identity and social world since I didn't know anyone else with a baby. The rounds of baby/toddler groups certainly helped. For dads where there aren't those networks, the temptation to slot back into their old world with no change must be strong.

"But I don't think there is an obvious one which only 'the patriarchy' is standing in the way of."

There are plenty of ways that the patriarchy stands in the way of fairness for women, and for mothers.,

It's too detailed to go into here, but feminists have lots of answers, lots of strategic answers on how to proceed and go about creating a fairer world. YOu just have to read their work to find out what those are.

Tbh, a forum like this is the ideal place to share and reference what those strategic answers are in particular so people can discuss how a theoretical strategic answer can be translated into a practical solution to a material and practical question/problem.

For me, the problem is indeed really hard and whichever way you go, there is no free or simple answer. Where patriarchy comes into play is how that particular problem is resolved. The SAHP model, has many advantages in that it is simple to manage; net benefit to the family in terms of service provided and arguably cost efficiencies. However for the SAHP, unless this role really your bag, it is massive ask and is a net cost on a personal level. And I think this true even when one partner moves to flexi working, but then has to cover all childcare and domestic work at the expense of their career progression.

So you would expect to see a higher proportion of house holds to pick up a model closer to nooka's, which is no easier and more complex to manage....but is fairer to all members of the family (which can mean less good for say kids and previous single WOHP).

Yet, we have a societal narrative that 'persuades' women to take the personal hit for the total family good, then judges them on top of it, which is patriarchy in play....the alternatives will not be easier or less complex, but they are fairer.

I agree with Snowmama these are the hard questions that parents (and policy makers) are grappling with, and I think it's great to have somewhere like MN to talk about our individual dilemmas and and experiences and link them together with wider systemic changes needed.

I am not sure why it should too detailed to discuss here. Has MN issued a word limit?

What do people think are the prorities/solutions here?

Great question. I think what is exciting about MM is how different voices and perspectives can be represented. I keep meaning to add a thread to where people can link to relevant policies or reports of the impact of policies on women (sunshine I am thinking of your report on the other thread.

For example, for me one key priority is retention of women in employment. Why because we do live in a society, where financial autonomy (or lack of it ) impacts on pretty much every facet of our lives. But would welcome any challenge to this as without discussion you can't generate any reasonable ideas.

Actually, when you start looking...there are quite few changes that have happened in the last 30-50 years ....equal opportunities, maternity leave, legal rights to flexible working etc...what really interests me, is how these nation wide policies are translated into organisational policies and how they are implemented. For example, it all very well offering part time and flexible working...but if it means your career progression stops or you are first in line for redundancy..then this will ultimately drive a different behaviour from those in part time/flexible working than the policy originally intended.

I would be interested in seeing how successful organisations are at managing female retention.

Was just thinking of sunshine's call for childcare to be tax deductable. I think the problem with that is it is regressive, because the lowest paid don't pay tax, or don't pay much tax, so the higher paid will benefit more - because they pay more tax, and may choose to use more expensive childcare (e.g. nannies).

Then you have the problem of what kind of childcare should be tax deductable - do after school fencing lessons count etc..? And since many people use family childcare do you make that tax deductable what is to stop people claiming the maximium allowance just by moving money around within their family?

So in designing the policy you would probably have to make it a tax credit, which cuts off at high income levels, and with some strictness around types of childcare...and it starts to look with WTC.

Yes, though I may be the only person that thinks that conceptually WTC...is a pretty good thing (this may or may not have been your point!).

...but why despite numerous policy intervention do women often, but not always feel that this is their problem to resolve on a personal level (myself included when I was married...)

I was just musing on the tax deductible thing Himalaya. I think you make a very good point about it not actually helping very many women as those on lower incomes wouldn't get very much childcare back under that set-up. Back to the drawing board...

I'd actually like to see all childcare hugely state subsidised for all women. I know it would cost an absolute fortune, but it's the only way I can see that will give women who want to work on an equal playing field with men. People will say that's impossible to fund but then the same thing was said about the welfare system and the NHS, the abolition of slavery etc etc. But then I am of the opinion that we should all pay more tax on the basis that if all essential services were free we would all need a lot less out of our pay-packets and the extra funding/less disposable income might discourage the development of two-tier privatised systems. I am aware it's not that popular a viewpoint

I am quite a radical feminist, and I also think that if the married nuclear family were not the default position many women would form symbiotic groups where childcare was exchanged for economic or practical help. In a limited fashion this has happened with me and several of my single parent friends. It is hugely to all our advantages and the really nice thing is that 'free' childcare in this model really is valued, appreciated and never taken for granted because we recognise that it comes at a cost for the person providing it (having all been there ourselves).

Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist or an odd sort of romantic (or just mad ) but I just don't see why having a long-term loving relationship with a man means that you have to live with him and have economic inter-dependence with him if that's not actually the best set up for you.

Til the revolution comes, however, I am looking at solutions that could work in the here and now. Tax deductible childcare was one of them, but I think Himalaya has quite fairly pointed out the flaws with that. I would still like to see a law passed that makes absent parents liable for 50% of childcare costs though.

I am aware that this board is probably the only place on MN I could post these comments without some serious and reactions. But hey -

...but why despite numerous policy intervention do women often, but not always feel that this is their problem to resolve on a personal level (myself included when I was married...)

Snowmama I think it's because cultural change takes an awful long time to catch up with legislative change, especially if legislative change simply outlaws inequality (passive move) rather than creating a set-up to encourage equality (active). That's one reason I'd like the 50% childcare costs. It makes a bold statement that children have two parents and that the responsibilities should be divided equally between the two (financially at least).

sunshine - I have said similar on MN before, and have always been shouted down as having a huge sense of entitlement, or that I shouldn't have had children if I couldn't afford childcare for them (that was never the point I was making), and that the state couldn't be expected to fund women's hobby jobs when they should be home looking after their children anyway. Very sad.

Yes Snowmama I think I was saying in a roundabout way that WTC, for all it's bureaucracy is a pretty decent policy, and that an apparently simpler one like tax deductible childcare would bot work.