I was saying last weekend that in my view the question of working mothers and childcare was going to be central to how women vote in the next election: whoever comes up with an intelligent solution to this omnipresent problem will be rewarded with a mass of votes (and a place in heaven, probably).
This subject just doesn’t go away. Last week 32-year-old Phoebe Philo, the über-successful, award-winning designer at Chloé, left her job for “family reasons”, saying that her intention was “especially to spend more time with my new baby in the coming months”.
Consternation all round. Everybody thought the same thing, namely that if someone like Philo — young, rich, successful — can’t manage it, what possible iota of hope is there for the rest of us? Then came reports suggesting that the government’s idea of after-school clubs — where the children of working parents have access to “wraparound services” from 8am to 6pm from 2010 — may not be quite so nifty after all.
Christopher Arnold, an education psychologist, told the Division of Educational and Child Psychology’s annual conference that these clubs may result in “very different kinds of adults from those we might have expected”. He warned of children growing up “emotionally unhealthy” as a result of less than top-notch institutionalised childcare, basing his findings on a study in the West Midlands. In this a boy of seven said he was “not at home very much ” and a girl of nine said she went to after-school clubs because “my mum likes time to herself”.
A boy of six said he liked his club but would rather go home, while an eight-year-old girl said she “missed my mum”. Arnold also said that previous research had shown that children raised in institutions had more emotional difficulties than those brought up in families.
This is hardly terribly surprising — if I were a child who had to spend 10 hours a day at school five days a week I would fall into a coma of depression. If I were the same child and my early years had been spent stuck at nursery all day, every day, for 10 hours a day from the age of three months, I would probably be catatonic.
I always get a furious mailbag when I say this but it doesn’t stop it being true. Seriously: why bother having children? Would you leave your dog in a kennel for 10 hours a day, every day? No, you’d feel sorry for it and besides somebody would (quite rightly) call the RSPCA.
There was a report published last September which measured levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in young children. It concluded that toddlers starting at nursery after being at home since birth experienced high levels of stress in the first weeks after separating from their mothers and were still showing “chronic mild stress” five months after their first day in the new environment.
A related study showed that children at nursery have consistently high levels of cortisol, rather than that level fluctuating during the day as it would do at home. Instead, these children remain “unusually aroused or stressed” and, this study concluded, need extra time and attention at the end of the day to help to bring them back to “emotional equilibrium”, ready for (hooray) the next day at nursery.
When that comfort from parents is not forthcoming, says the paper, the children start the following day “hyper-aroused”, which can lead to behaviour problems and/or disobedience. At which stage the poor little creatures probably get diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and given class B drugs such as Ritalin to “calm them down”.
It is as enraging as it is heart-breaking. There exists no research that I can find to suggest that very young children benefit from nursery in any shape or form. A series of studies in America and Britain have concluded that high levels of group-based care can have damaging effects on some aspects of emotional and psychological development for children under two. After two the situation reverses and group-based care apparently benefits all aspects of a child’s development, which sits a bit oddly with the cortisol findings but at least makes sense in terms of social development.
Obviously not all nurseries are dark, evil places, the attending of which will turn your child into a misfit. Young children, especially those without siblings, clearly benefit from hanging out with other small children in a safe and loving environment for a few sessions a week. But the current situation is such that a) not all nurseries are safe or indeed loving; b) they are not seen as an enjoyable and necessary diversion to the rest of the week, but rather as kennels for children to be shoved into while their parents get on with their lives; and c) often this sad state of affairs is expressedly against the parents’ wishes but has come about out of financial necessity.
While it is easy — and apropos — to blame a succession of governments for creating this new generation of latchkey children (except that at least the original latchkey generation were in their own cosy homes, not in spirit-sapping school-type institutions), it is also imperative that working mothers ask themselves the kind of tough questions they have become so good at avoiding.
The first thing to address is the fact that you can only have it all if, bluntly put, you can afford staff. Having it all is impossible if you are poor, or even averagely hard-up. Since most people are not drowning in money, most people need to let go of the notion that it is possible to have a career (rather than just a job) and small children at the same time.
Two, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the notion of sacrifice, rather than getting cross at the notion and mumbling about patriarchy and the horrid unfairness of it all. The horrid unfairness is not going to go away, and neither is the fact that men don’t get pregnant or feel umbilically attached to their children long after they’ve emerged from the womb.
Women therefore need to feel pleased and proud of themselves for choosing, if that is what they want, to stay at home looking after their babies. Unfortunately, many of them do indeed feel pleased and proud, only for other women to come along and make them feel like pathetic, boring, invisible throwbacks. This has got to stop if anyone is to move forward.
Thirdly, anyone contemplating having children should bear in mind that, in view of all of this, the whole business is getting harder, not easier, and that unless you have a plan, or childcare arrangements that you are happy with (such as helpful grannies or siblings), you are going to end up miserable and your children are, too. Throwing away your contraception and keeping your fingers crossed, hoping for the best, has never looked more delusional.
- Apparently balsamic vinegar is now deeply unfashionable. How completely stupid is that? A comestible thing is either delicious or un-delicious and, one would have hoped, as far removed from the vagaries of fashion as the weather, or trees, or teapots. But no: poor old balsamic has supposedly had its day. Who comes up with this nonsense? Are potatoes passé today? Are beetroots to-die-for sexy at the moment? Does anybody need to get a life?
I hate food fashions. Imagine being the kind of person who sneers at a green bean because it’s too 1980s, or at a rocket and parmesan salad (with balsamic, natch) because it’s so 1992.
Needless to say the kind of food we all like eating best — comfort food, or classic French bistro stuff — is food that is technically about as trendy as a pair of loon pants. That’s the food we will queue round the block for and it’s fashion proof.
Balsamic falls in the same category. Dress your salad with pride!
