Working mothers lambasted again!!

[Missmibaby]

Has anyone seen The Times today? Yet more articles telling us that wokring mothers are bad for their kids development. Isn't it funny how all the examples they use are middle-class women who left well-paid jobs, who are married to husbands with extremely well-paid jobs: bankers, lawyers, media-types. One of the headlines was that a woman didn't go back to work until her children were ten years old. The article then went to explain how she worked from her attic whilst employing full-time nannies! Real world? Not for most of us. I am the main wage-earner in our house. My DP is on £20,000 per year and our mortgage is c.£10,000 per year. What little luxuries would anyone recommend we cut back on if I were to give up work. Beleive me I do nothing but think about my son all day, I would love to be with him. I have another on the way and am trying to think of ways that I can work less. My son has always been cared for by well-chosen loving people. The childcare arrangements have changed very little inhis short life and I think he is a well-balanced, sociable, well-advanced little boy. I think the most important thing that he has in his life is that I love him to bits and I make sure he knows it!! Sorry for the rant I know it's not mumsnet faultbut but these generalisations make me so

I don't think women who stay at home are better or worse than women who go to work. It's how they treat thei kids that matters.

The study about benefits of preschool education (over 3s) and how nursery daycare may affect the behaviour of under 3s aren't incompatible though. It's not an either/or debate for all children, it's about age-appropriate care, and the authors seem to be suggesting that close relationships with carers are important for the under 3s. Government policies and the set-up of nurseries should take that into account.
I saw Zoe William's comment and though I like her writing I couldn't really understand why she did that piece - she hasn't got any children. I had completely different views on children before I had any myself.

Actually, it can't just be about close family relationships or grandmothers would score more highly than childminders. But it is about small groups of children getting lots of attention from an individual carer in a secure setting. There's no reason why nurseries can't take that on board. Some may already do that.

Hmmm...Aloha, I think those policies are actually fundamentally split because they are also underpinned by the belief that women who choose/want to work outside the home are not the norm. After all the current 'norm' for work assumes that all childcare and indeed a lot of the other domestic work is taken care of. By women. For men in 'proper' jobs.

Not that I'm bitter or anything (says woman whose partner is away again).

So are we saying that the one to one care is best for the young ones. That sounds like a nanny to me. Yet that is the care that government lease supports. I pay taxes 'til I'm blue in the face just to go work so I can pay the nanny so I can go to work... (sigh)

least, not lease

Caligula, because it be more than his jobsworth. Is there not some misconception bred into us that the "man" is the one that is "supposed" to be the hierarchy when it comes to these sort of things and we still go to work and are still expected to run the household.

Don't get me wrong it doesn't bother me, I am better at paying the bills and doing the mundane things but just want to scream sometimes.

I am all for the Happy Working Mummies United Front that you've started!

However, I feel really sad for any mums who are already doing a guilt trip if they don't want to work - this study and all the subsequent banter must just make them feel even worse than they probably do already.

I agree with Aloha- there is no finincial incentive for mothers (who want to) to stay at home - but there is money available to put them in a nursery.

MI- I do think that most mum's of babies and young toddler's don't want to work full time, the majority may not want to work at all. But many have to go back at 6 months. That's just from my experience (of listening to people who have really agonised over having to go back wehn their baby is 6 months- even when only going part time).

"Wanting" to stay at home is a constrained choice in a particular culture. If you asked mothers "would you like to go back to work, 3 days a week, with flexible hours, on a decent salary, with subsidised high quality childcare available close by?" I suspect far more women would say "yes". as they do, say, in Sweden where the situation is more like that.

but if you ask "would you like to go back to a low paid job with overpriced crap childcare and unsuppoortive managers?" they are more likely to say No. and that is quite often the case in the UK.

You can be keen to go back to work and still find it rather hard to leave your baby in childcare at the beginning. Just as it can be hard to leave them at school at the start, and (apparently) at university. That doesn't mean you don't want them to go to school or uni, but the transition can be stressful.

But MI, I do think that women who actively want to return to work full time working our traditional long inflexible hours when their children are babies are in a minority - and a fairly small minority too. Don't you think?
But I think current policy is to push all women into work, whether they want to or not. It's how our tax and benefits system is arranged.
The tax and benefits system also explicitly favours some kinds of childcare (mostly nurseries) over others - so I think it is very worthwhile looking at whether the system is funding the best and most appropriate care for the very young.

very much agree with Aloha and Caligula - thiskind of research is useful for the purposes of identifying for us as a society the right policies to encourage and where to spend money - collective choices, more than individual ones, which will always be based on much more complex set of factors than one set of research results v another.
by the way, there is a letter in today's Guardian responding to the Zoe Williams article that states that "five years ago, the Dept for Education and Skills commissioned research which revelaed that on average a child in a nursery received only eight minutes of undiluted adult care a day, The study was never published." Has anyone ever heard of this? pretty incendiary stuff.

And boring though it is, women lose out on pension contributions in the long term if they are not working. Which becomes significant if neither parent has much in the way of savings or pension provision.

This is the bit I find interesting about the research protocol:

'Secure attachments to caregivers have been shown to be associated with a range of positive outcomes for children such as more creative and sociable play ... while breaches of that security, such as changes of caregiver, have been shown to be associated with negative outcomes ... However the applicability of such findings to the UK is confused by differences in the ways related variables are defined. A recent small-scale survey of nursery workers' views of a "key worker" approach to the care of children under three, for example, found general support for the approach but diametrically opposed views of what it meant. Some respondents saw and welcomed keyworking as an opportunity to facilitate and support close relationships between designated staff and individual children, while others saw and supported the keyworker system only as liaison between the nursery and the assigned children's parents. This research further suggests that in the UK, close attachments between nursery-workers and infants are not always aimed for in training or aspired to in practice. "... the system is not designed to place a particular child under the particular care of individual members of staff. Care is taken by staff not to form strong, deep, emotional attachments that can occur when one to one care is given." (Elfer &
Selleck, 1996).'

INteresting research, MuminLondon. I think in a good nursery (which luckily I believe I have for my child) you will get fairly decent staff retention and avoid a massive turnover of staff. (On the other hand most care assistants are on the minimum wage so they aren't going to stay forever.)My 18 mo (and his big brother before him) have formed good attachments to their caregivers but the staff:child ration of 1:3 in the baby room means that there are three caregivers and so the deep one-on-one attachments that often give problems with nanies/childminders don't develop. It works for me and my kids. My eldest son's key worker left nursery just before him and she still keeps in touch and babysists occasionally and DS1 sees her as a good friend, not just a 'teacher'.

I don't know where the 8 mins/day contact time research came from, Buffy, I've never heard of it and I'm positive DS2 gets a lot more than that at nursery (but it's probably true of the face to face contact he gets with me at home! )

MUST emember to preview. Sorry about all the typos

I don't think this debate should be black and white but newspapers love a good catfight among women. I agree with the letter in the Guardian from the academic at Roehampton and the one buffy referred to was interesting too. My dd has a close attachment to her childminder, but I don't see her as a threat (that was one of the reasons a couple in my NCT group decided against childminders). Possibly because my DH took over part of the care for a while after I returned to work and I just had to get used to sharing her after so many months of being with her exclusively. I'm sure even two or three regular carers can give a sense of security too. The important thing for me is continuity - if I hadn't found the right childminder I would want a nursery where there is at least one key worker staying with the same group of children up to the age of 5 like an 'auntie' figure, rather than a change of carers every year as they move into the next 'class'.

ni I had never heard of the "eight minute" reference either. lord, imagine the headlines if that was published - would make this one look like a minor skirmish

Buffy I have no idea what 'undiluted adult care' means - does it mean one-to-one time wityh one child and one carer? It would be interesting again to benchmark this kind of sweeping statement against childminders who are responsible for more than one child (as is generally the case) and also parents with more than one child.

I completely agree Fennel's post about constrained choice. Can I just add again that we are forgetting about fathers in all this - my dp actually doesn't want to work full time hours either. he wants to spend time with our children as much as I do which is why we have both reduced our working hours.

I think Issysmummy has summed it up. How many of us have read the original article (I haven't) but have just heard the medias view of it. (How many of the media reporting it actually read the report fully?). I have just looked at the outcome measures that they were investigating which look fairly extensive. The only result I heard reported on the radio was that children in childcare didn't hold eye contact with the investigator as long as a child in its mothers care - so what! I didn't realise this was a validated indicator of future success. Would be much more interesting to read the whole report and see which outcomes really correlated with which type of childcare. The other thing with these studies is whether they only compare full time childcare with fulltime mothering. I can't believe this is the situation for most people, as most people I know do varying degrees of part-time work, fathers doing childcare etc

no puddle I don't know what it means either. I presume it means one on one attention.
it is such a startling "factoid" thatI would really love to know where it comes from and if it is for real.

good points about undiluted care. with 3 small children my 1 year old rarely gets 1-1 care even with a parent at home. maybe when we're changing a nappy. My dd3 probably gets more individual attention at nursery where it's only a 1-3 ratio and carer isn't also trying to do other things.

btw am Fennel as seasonally Evil Herb.

I think one thing that can be good about childminders is that they are a more 'natural' environment in that the children tend to be of varying ages - as in a family - and siblings can be together. And I say this as someone who wasn't mad about her childminder.

i would want a carer to love my child.

sums it up for me, aloha. I would love my childminder to have dd after school till she's 11.