Domestic zombies, motherhood penalty & childcare

[JessSi]

Hi. New to mumsnet & have been looking for a discussion on pre-school childcare provision – I'm starting this thread in S&G because frankly motherhood, triggers the full weight of sex-based oppression, so seems relevant.

As most people know but in Holly Mead's words from The Times, this week:

“The system is rigged against women, who are at a financial disadvantage from the moment they decide to have a family. While they are on maternity leave they typically receive no pension contributions from their employer. They are then likely to remain out of full-time work for three years, until some free childcare is available. Then they often take low-paid and part-time work to fit around family life. In many cases they will not earn enough to qualify for auto-enrolment, meaning the pension gender gap widens to a chasm.”

To avoid motherhood penalty, the solution is often presented as providing women with the opportunity to outsource the care of their children from birth or shortly after enabling re-entry into the paid labour market as soon as possible. See PregnantthenScrewed’s recent protest about lack of affordable childcare. Although, in many developed countries, looks like women are sensibly taking an anti-natalist approach to motherhood given the economic detriment and vulnerability that it triggers.

But irrationally many women (like me) still do choose to have children and apparently, of women who do have children in the UK, the majority, 8 out 10, (see Frank Young in The Times, 3/11/22) want to spend more time parenting their children, not less.
They don’t want to outsource the care of their children, they want to do it themselves.
Mostly likely because they believe this is in their children’s best interests?

We are told that because of a lack of access to affordable childcare, women are concentrated in unpaid and low paid part-time work but perhaps both things are true, women do not have access to good quality affordable childcare and along with a genuine desire to ensure their children’s needs are properly met, women work unpaid or part-time and absorb a massive economic disadvantage, triggered by motherhood, that continues for the rest of our lives. This situation plays out at the sharp end for single parent women and women in economically abusive co-parenting relationships – whether married/cohabiting or separated.

I don’t think this is ethical or fair.

So. What’s the solution? I often lean in to a wage for housework position but this is problematic in lots of ways.

What's the view of mumsnetter's on all this? And what's the solution?

While flexible jobs are shitty and low paid it’s not possible for both partners to take them. One partner needs to have a “proper” well paid job to pay the bills, leaving the other partner with the shitty job and all of the childcare. But if flexible jobs were good and well paid then both partners could take them and share childcare equally.

^ that's true.

you’ve just done exactly what I tried to point out in previous posts by singling out high-earning women for outsourcing childcare. In the majority of cases, there are two working parents there who are both using childcare to enable them to continue their careers, pensions etc. Childcare is not just the women’s responsibility to sort out but society constantly reinforces that it is. Regardless of class and income, all women (and men) are repeatedly given the message that mothers are the ones who need to change, compromise, juggle everything. And fathers can just carry on as they were before.

Motherhood, is not in my view, simply a gender role that can be socially engineered away. Women's bodies are materially different to men, bc of that we have a very unique and specific relationship with our babies/children. I am not saying that dad's/the other parent is not fascinating. We are a sexually dimorphic species and because of this men can just literally carry on as they were. They cannot get pregnant, they cannot give birth, they cannot breastfeed, men cannot be mothers.

Our partners (if we have them) can see the dependancy of this tiny new person on its mother and often rightly decide they would be most useful out of the house and earning money. I suppose if women were willing to return to paid work 24 hours after birth, this would not be the case. I believe in the States women get two weeks maternity leave (I don't know if its paid). I think we would all agree this is barbarism. Nevertheless we all know, all women are entrapped in unpaid care work and domestic labour, to some extent. Low income women more so. While I agree that the issue of women's unpaid labour and outsourcing childcare cannot simply be the mothers responsibility - there needs to be structural change if exploitation of women's unpaid labour and the motherhood penalty is going to end. I do not think that paternity leave is a fix.

Just from this thread, we have seen that many do not think it is sensible to have both parents taking a hit to their careers by taking off time for unpaid care work. Secondly, it seems many women would rather care for their children themselves rather leave their children with their partner or in a commercial childcare setting and their partners would prefer this too. And seemingly either as a result of socialisation, weaponised incompetence, uselessness or whatever it seems that for many it would not be appropriate to leave a small child for extended periods of time with their partners. And possibly, given the choice babies and very young children would probably vote to remain in the care of their mothers for a long as possible too.

Hmm I’m not sure. I agree OP @JessSi that the mother-baby relationship is biologically determined and essential in the early months - at least 6 months I think, probably 12 months in terms of good outcomes for all. But I’m not sure that has to extend for all the pre school years and hence (as things currently stand) have an often disproportionately detrimental effect on women’s earned income and therefore also pension etc, for the rest of her life.
i think fathers are equally capable from about the age of 1 of not before, and if it were more “normal” (socially expected, and financially rewarded) for fathers to take a chunk of leave, and for both parents thereafter to share the load (actual and mental), then women wouldn’t have such a big hole to climb out of.
(As we’ve all pretty much agreed, no one size fits all here and everyone should make their own choice on the level of childcare to use, if any).
I do think if employers paid for more paternity leave, and didn’t restrict it to 2 weeks right after birth (when it’s pretty much useless apart from cooking and fetching and carrying for Mum) then it would start to change societal expectations. Paying for it would start to signal that it’s a worthwhile thing, even something to look forward to, and men experiencing the same return to work on ramp after a break might make the same transition less stigmatising for women, as everyone starts to share the burden of raising the next generation.
utopia?

I remain unconvinced that that paternity leave is a fix or in anyway utopian. I do find it funny tho, that any mention of paternity leave comes with strong arguments that men should be paid. Honestly, beyond irony.

I do agree that normalising a 4 days week, for both parents would be a good move forward. As would good quality affordable childcare. I think the economics of looking after under 3's in a commercial setting probably just don't add up in an affordable way. Nor do I think babies or young children in commercial childcare settings for 8/10 hours a day is utopian. Obviously, I appreciate current context and pragmatism is very important and a woman's capacity for financial independence is critical.

Paternity Leave needs to be paid (and only available to dad / 2nd parent) to incentivise its take up.
When men do a substantial amount of sole care (months, not Saturday afternoons when mum has prepared everything) they become much more aware of the work involved and it leads to a more equal household.
Obviously only women can carry babies and give birth and breastfeed, but from 6/9/12 months a father can look after a child just as well.

No offence but honesty more interested in reimbursing women for years, sometimes a life time, of unpaid care work and domestic labour, than than pointlessly trying to financially incentivise men to take up 6 weeks of paternity leave. Can’t believe I bother even responding to that but here we are.

@JessSi I completely get where you are coming from, but it is important to get men to take at least 6 weeks paternity leave, preferably more.

the reason is that if they do that, they are more likely to stay home when the baby/child is sick and cannot go to nursery. Taking time off to look after sick children falls disproportionately on women. I think is is because both parents few more comfortable if the mum does it. That has to change.

I do think its a vicious circle. As long as caring is seen as 'women's work' it will continue to be un appreciated, underpaid etc.
Care work (paid and unpaid) is incredibly important to society.

Commitment to our children has different evolutionary 'best fit' costs and benefits for women vs men.

During most of our evolutionary history, we have been animals who need to find enough food to survive each day, and avoid being eaten or dying from illness/injury ourselves. We also obviously need to reproduce, and the offspring survive into adulthood, in order for those successful genes to pass on.

By the time a baby is born, the mother has invested a huge amount in it. She's provided calories for 9 months, been less mobile during late pregnancy (harder to get food and vulnerable to predators), and risked injury or death during childbirth. She will provide all calories for another year minimum whilst breastfeeding, and likely a good percentage for several years more.She has the capacity to have a maximum of 15 - 20 pregnancies during her lifetime, but some of these babies in pre-medical days would have been likely to die in infancy. Each child is a huge investment, one of only a few chances at reproduction, and worth enormous effort to protect.

Men on the other hand pay none of the biological cost of reproduction. They contribute no calories, and have no increased risk. They do need sexual access to a female to reproduce, so the child of a frequent sexual partner is worth some effort to protect (since the child is likely theirs, and they will get continued sexual access to father more children) . But they have many lower cost strategies as well, and have the capacity to father many, many children. (Of course, if they don't get sexual access to a female they can't reproduce - that's the balancing down-side to being male). Each child is a fairly small investment, and may be one amongst many.

And men can rely on the fact that children are so much more important to the mother that she will keep giving more, so they don't need to.

And that evolutionary difference does hugely influence our behaviour. This is a fundamental inequality between men and women. If we ignore it, and pretend that men and women are exactly the same, then we model the world incorrectly, and things won't turn out the way we want them to.

As I get older, I recognise more and more how and why marriage is important. It basically brings social pressure to bear to force men to provide for their children and provide some protection to women taking on the cost of motherhood. Although these days, paternity tests could be used instead...

If the state put as much effort into getting money from men to support their children as it puts into tax fraud - and that money was given to whoever was caring for the kids - whether married or not, so it was clear that £x of the father's salary belonged to the SAHM - I think that would go a long way to reduce financial inequality between men and women.

Paid paternity leave is not an incentive for men to take it. It’s a necessity in order for them to be ABLE to take it! My husband COULD NOT take even one week of paternity leave because he would only get paid £156 per week, so we would have been £1k per week out of pocket, and we couldn’t afford that. It massively affects women when men CAN’T take paternity leave even when they want and need to.

I nearly died giving birth, I had major surgery and I couldn’t even get out of bed without help. I certainly couldn’t look after my baby on my own. But I was discharged from hospital less than 48 hours after my surgery and my husband couldn’t even take a single week of paternity leave to look after me because of the huge financial penalty that he would incur. So yes, I think paid paternity leave is very important!

There are good reasons for paid paternity leave, especially where we have made extended families a non-viable support in many cases for young mums, New mothers do need support and if there is no grandmother or sisters around to help, because they live far away or are working,the dad is really the only option.

But the idea that the answer is somehow convincing women that want to stay with their babies and young kids to let dads do it instead, or even forcing it through the public benefits structure, seems not only backwards, but anti-woman to me. Nor should women be forced to hand over their young kids to paid carers and go to work to pay said careers when they would rather care for them themselves.

Some men will be happy to care in that way too, or families may choose that because it suits their circumstances in some way, but I think it will always be fewer than women. The fact is women are primed to bond closely in order to prompt good infant care, and breastfeeding tends to increase that with the hormonal effects it produces.

The state trying to engineer family decisions like this for some abstract goal of their own is over-stepping, I think.

I think changing men's behaviour is essential. And I have no time for pop evolutionary psychology, it's basically guesswork used to shore up the oppression of women 'because this is how it has always been'. We have large flexible brains, and we live in a world where men usually have two or three children with just one woman, they need to start investing their time in raising those children. To encourage that we need to reduce the financial hit by having paid paternity leave, just like we reduce the financial hit for women by having paid maternity leave. And we need to start asking men who become fathers what flexible working arrangements they are going to take. There needs to be a societal shift so men no longer think it's OK to carry on as if nothing has happened when they have children.

The fact is women are primed to bond closely in order to prompt good infant care, and breastfeeding tends to increase that with the hormonal effects it produces
My SIL is the highest earner, her husband wanted to drop to part time while she worked full time. She said no - she wanted to look after her own baby, she wanted to breastfeed and she wanted the life experience of going to baby groups with the other mums and pushing prams around the park etc. She felt he would be taking a nice experience away from her. So she had her year of being a yummy mummy and then went back to work (because she got paid enough to cover childcare).

And we need to start asking men who become fathers what flexible working arrangements they are going to take. There needs to be a societal shift so men no longer think it's OK to carry on as if nothing has happened when they have children.
I don’t think the problem is men. It’s employers. Once you get to a certain level they won’t accept you being flexible around kids. They expect more hours and more dedication than a parent can offer. When I was waiting to go into labour my husbands employer was yelling that he needed a fucking date and demanding that I should book a c section so he could know exactly what date my husband would be absent.

The state trying to engineer family decisions like this for some abstract goal of their own is over-stepping, I think.

The state already does this in various areas. The cap on child benefit, giving tax relief on pension payments and childcare costs, fixing the boundaries at which you pay different taxes or lose benefits all impact people's decisions about how much they work and how big a family they have.

I don’t think the problem is men. It’s employers. Once you get to a certain level they won’t accept you being flexible around kids. They expect more hours and more dedication than a parent can offer. When I was waiting to go into labour my husbands employer was yelling that he needed a fucking date and demanding that I should book a c section so he could know exactly what date my husband would be absent.

Not all employers, we have PT employees at all levels and our SLT is half female despite being what was traditionally a very male dominated industry. But generally, I agree many employers are a big problem and having worked for my employer for a long time I have plenty of horror stories from the past where we were less good than we are now.

That's an interesting and important take. Thanks.

Sorry to hear about terrible birth.

I'm leaning more and more into all women being paid a massive monthly motherhood stipend for the first 3 years of a child's life, limited to 2 children, this could be used to compensate women for their exclusion from the labour market or to outsource childcare. If the woman's partner wanted to take care of the children, the child's mother could financially compensate him, if necessary. This would give women independence and choice.

Just wanted to go back to this ^. The point of this thread, really.

Women absorb a massive economic disadvantage, triggered by motherhood, to ensure their children's needs are met, particularly in those early years. Outsourcing is often not appropriate or affordable. Partners also absorbing financial penalty doesn't make economic sense. Not least of all bc men's salaries tend increase when they become fathers.

I think more and more that instead of focussing on trying to financially incentivise men to take on care work. (lol) Why not argue that women should be paid for the work many of us are doing unpaid.

I think marriage used to be a way of making sure the economics were redistributed towards families and children. The idea was that the man earned the money because he had the wherewithal, and it was household money, not just his personal allowance.

Now obviously, in practice this has been flawed and widely abused, especially in the context of a patriarchal society. Plus, if you look back in history, working class women have always worked while looking after their families, generally with the support of extended family. The ‘nuclear family’ ideal is a 20th c. middle class myth.

Pre industrial revolution pretty much everyone, including the children, worked, too, of course, and work was more often done in and around the home. I expect the opening of factories, and the concurrent establishing of schools to enable women to leave the home and enter more regimented forms of work was a hinge moment that we've really not yet come to terms with.

I think marriage used to be a way of making sure the economics were redistributed towards families and children
That’s the whole idea of alimony isn’t it? To compensate the wife who was at home doing unpaid work and give her some of the future benefits of the job that her support has enabled her husband to get.

You seem to be taking it for granted that it's better for children if their mothers don't work, but that's very much not established fact. It's a contentious issue - my own view (but not what I've done for my own children) is that it is probably a bit better if they have a single carer until around 2/3 if all other things are equal. But all other things aren't equal nearly all of the time, and it seems likely to make a very small difference to child outcomes either way and is probably pretty low down the list of parenting decisions that have a clear lasting impact. At this point if there were big negative or positive cross-cohort effects that came directly from being in childcare I think we'd know. But the truth is that no one does and the evidence is inconclusive and conflicting.

You also seem to be very much conflating women not wanting to be away from their children and it being better for those children to not be away from their mothers, but they're not the same things. Your argument seems to be that SAHMs should be paid from public money because they provide a public good, but I don't think that's a case you've proven.

Marking place to read later. I am acutely aware of the impact marriage has had on my health and earnings, mainly because I'm considering divorce.

I don't actually think that in human societies it is the case that absolutely all care is done by mum. Yes, lots of early care is done by mum and lots of breastfeeding. But also I always understood that the benefits of early communities was socialisation of childcare and domestic tasks to a degree. The "couple" unit is only part of a wider picture, which also allows women some time away from their kids to contribute to the community with the help of other mums and community elders. The modern tendency to "helicopter" kids has been shown to be damaging; kids do need time to themselves and time in the company of other children. It is important to have security of care. but OP, I think your view is also playing into the unnatural martyrdom that comes with modern parenting.

(I work part time around two young kids - I like working, not least because it provides me with a lot of security. I also like that I spend more time with my kids than they spend away from me. I find it a relief that they can be happy in the care of other people than me. I don't need to be told I am odd for this.).