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?

The ‘nuclear family’ ideal is a 20th c. middle class myth.

I read somewhere that poorer parents still tend to work shifts round each other to maximise earnings and minimise childcare costs and so working class men do more childcare than middle class men who often have either a wife working PT or completely SAH while they do their very important job.

And with that would come pressure on low paid women to have a child, or have a second one, from some men.

Why would any woman need to take three years off work? The first year I can understand, but why three?

Sorry, just realised that you said that the money could be used to outsource care. I think there is an argument for state nurseries or government contributions to child care costs.

Why is it that every time women as a class start to gain important legal freedoms and rights, prevailing theories of child development and education become ever more demanding and prescriptive? In the 18th century, as Mary Wollstonecraft was rewriting the rulebook on women’s potential, Rousseau was advancing a theory on childhood purity that turned the mother into the Angel in the House and the family into a cage. In the 20th century, when women gained the vote and started to enter education and gain real professional influence, along came Freud, Truby King, Bowlby, Spock and a host of others, with often contradictory but zealously dogmatic ideas about the mother’s influence on her children. Now of course, we’re stuck between the rock of a ridiculous safety-focused helicopter parenting model of family life and the hard place of employers who are barely better than slave drivers.

I think my ultimate point is that family needs and women’s need for achievement elsewhere are not inherently working against each other; I think the needs of the family have been actively weaponised against us, and this is what we’re really fighting. No amount of tinkering with the system or compensation for disadvantage will change things, unless we face the fact that influential people will do anything to keep us in our box and we need to keep fighting them to find our way out.

I never thought about it like that before. Interesting connection. Thank you.

@DatasCat Agreed needs of children/our partners (usually male) within context of the family have been weaponsied against us.

No amount of tinkering with the system or compensation for disadvantage will change things, unless we face the fact that influential people will do anything to keep us in our box and we need to keep fighting them to find our way out.

I'm not sure what this means. Addressing the economic disadvantage that women face bc of years of care work is not tinkering.

A few days ago, Mary Harrington tweeted, "We will occupy our bodies We are our bodies We are done being enclosed and commodified ... the real reason they hate us is unlike believers of their religion of body dissociation, we are home We're occupying our selves Fight the body dissociation industry Fight Big Biotech's trans-industrial complex Fight zoomlife, fake food, fake sex, fake community Occupy Ourselves"

(In case anyone is interested in the tweet. twitter.com/moveincircles/status/1593902117357588480?s=20&t=jlKoBIzSx_MPE528fID-hw Links to a very interesting thread at the end too.)

Maybe a bit of an odd way of coming at this but from my perspective, transideology, the cult of body dissociation and second wave feminism converge in some respects. Second wave feminism came out of particular context, these women wanted to compete equally with men in the paid labour market (and thank goodness). Seems to me, the goal then was to erase the impact of sexual difference, bc idea was (not too unlike transideology) material reality of sexual difference is socially constructed to "keep us in our box". By erasing socially constructed sex roles (not our actual actual bodies, thats where transideology stepped in) women could compete equally in the paid labour market. Fine. Anyway, motherhood was uniquely druggerous and intellectually deadening. (These second wave women obviously did not envisage their liberated futures in paid carework or a call centre.). Unsurprisingly, when everywhere all you could see where women who were uniquely subjugated by their biology, the internalised misogyny of the second wave and desire to dissociate from sexual difference ran deep.

The second wave solutions - a) anti-natalism, b) outsource childcare to commercial childcare facility asap after birth (for many unaffordable &/or undesireable) c) outsource childcare & try and equalise motherhood penalty (shared parental leave etc - pay gap etc problematises this approach)

Or the last solution (there might be more??) so far unexplored - compensate women for (f/t or p/t) unpaid care work. And give women choice of affordable commercial childcare places (f/t or p/t). I think women might probably need access to (re)training and some sort of positive discrimination policies when they return to paid labour market too.

I can kind of see how this might be viewed as just tinkering. Perhaps we should be more radical. Perhaps if we occupied our bodies more we would be more radical? This is probably where you decided that I've lost the plot. What would you suggest?

[I'm at home unwell, might decide to delete this post when I regain normal equilibrium and see it doesn't make sense.]

Yes, they do, and the extent to which that is appropriate needs to be a careful decision. Mainly what they need to do is respond to the needs and wants of the population, rather than trying to direct them.

But the state has zero capacity to try and tell women and families how they should make their parenting arrangements. They have no special insight or knowledge, and no mandate to interfere in that way.

Trying to get between mothers and their small children is anti-female and anti-woman.

This is one of the underlying flaws in feminist thinkers emphasizing getting women into work. It really tends to take for granted that the model men adopted was good and healthy, and in a lot of ways is wasn't and isn't.

But this sort of pt situation is exactly what a lot of mothers want, at least past the infant period.

But it's never going to pay in the same way as a ft job, and I would argue that even a ft time job with a lot of flexibility usually won't pay the same as ft work that is demanding in terms of time and availability.

The idea that people doing more flexible, less immediately demanding jobs should get paid the same as those who do have jobs like that seems blatantly unfair if you turn it around - if anyone does a job with demands like that they will tend to expect more pay. And similarly the idea that somehow most men's jobs can all or largely become more flexible and less demanding is pretty unrealistic.

Ultimately, it will be common in families with kids to have at least one parent in a more flexible, and probably lower paying position. While the other may well end up in a more demanding, higher paying job, because they want that extra pay - to offset the lower pay of the other parent, or to pay for the costs associated with children. Demanding both parents have the same level of work doesn't make a lot of sense and it's not realistic.

And there will be many people, especially those with more than one child, where the reproductive role of each parents plays a part in who chooses the more flexible work.

The idea that people doing more flexible, less immediately demanding jobs should get paid the same as those who do have jobs like that seems blatantly unfair if you turn it around - if anyone does a job with demands like that they will tend to expect more pay.
Agreed. But flexible jobs should be the norm and demanding inflexible jobs should be the exception. People should be able to have proper professions like manager, solicitor, executive, and still work flexibly - then a minority of people work inflexibly for extra money. But in reality it’s the other way round - the vast majority of jobs are inflexible and professional jobs especially are very inflexible - and only the shitty jobs are flexible.