I thought this book was very promising because it does actually acknowledge the 'shattering' experience of being a mother of a baby and very young child in a first world country. Its premise is that there is no real shared care of the child between the mother and father and this is caused by social stereotypes about parenthood (particularly motherhood) which are reinforced by workplace practices, the maternity and afterbirth care offered by the NHS and governmental policies relating to parental leave. All these conspire to turn the mother into the sole carer of the child and a domestic drudge who not only ends up doing all the domestic work engendered by the arrival of the baby but is now expected to do all the family's work as the father is out earning a living to support the mother and child(ren), despite the fact that both shared the domestic work when both worked. This entrenches a situation in which the woman has most of the responsibility for child care and domestic work throughout her life. Effectively, although she doesn't say this, women are still being discriminated against in the home by men and a society that fails to accept that the mother is working, perhaps harder than ever before, in the home and therefore the men that share their lives still have a duty to care for themselves and their environment as well as doing some ( obviously somewhat reduced in comparison to the at home mother) childcare.
This problem, in the context of the increased educational achievement of women and lack of attachment of the fathers, is causing a falling birthrate as women either choose to have no children or only one. This has a knock on effect on the whole society - decreased workers in the future, positive discrimination for young migrants who will produce children, highly educated women who work in jobs well below their capacity, family breakup, reduced educational outcomes for children in one parent families.
Her analysis of how maternity care is dealt with by both the governmental policies relating to time off to attend antenatal care and the NHS is spot on. Apart from a few token gestures like fathers involved in the birth, we might just as well be back in the fifties or beyond in the way that fathers are excluded from the experience of becoming a parent. This is admirably detailed.
Her research into the parental leave and flexible working of other countries is very interesting and we do have a great deal to learn from these systems. It is also sad to realise that the earning power of women is now directly affected by motherhood.
However, her solution for the problems mentioned above is getting women back to work and facilitating this by better shared parental leave and childcare that is paid for by the state.
I have to say that her solution to this devastating social and personal discrimination was to return to work herself and place her child in daycare. That she wants something better is admirable but this solution does not address the problem of seeing all people as economic units and how to support women and children, in particular, and their partners to achieve a satisfactory experience of parenthood and childhood.
To institutionalise children from an early age risks creating institutionalised adults who cannot function unless someone else creates the structures in which they know how and when to do their work. As a recently retired teacher, I have had the experience of having to create time in the school day so that pupils could do their coursework as they could no longer be relied upon to do this work at home. Copying was rife, as was assuming that lifting something from the internet constituted personal work. It is almost a no brainer that some of today's parents would rather work than look after their children. They know exactly what to do at work to achieve an outcome. The outcomes of child rearing are less clear and far more long term.
Attachment theory is usually denigrated by those who want the majority of children in daycare to enable the state to regulate and improve this provision. Obviously, daycare with its multiple carers of several unrelated children and its lack of consistent carers across the first three years is absolutely contraindicated by Attachment Theory. When I was in Canada recently, I watched a very little boy who had obviously formed an attachment to one carer being made to sit, crying, with his new carer and new group. He sadly watched his old carer's new group and whenever he could, he snuck up to her and demanded affection. I have no particular brief for Attachment Theory but it does occur to me that if you want a society in which every adult is economically active, you have to disrupt the attachment that binds families so that you can get parents back to work and get them to hand over their child care to strangers. Is it possible that current family breakdowns and the discrimination against mothers are caused by a lack of attachment formed when today's parents and policy makers were children?
The experience described at the beginning of the book is almost universal in first world countries where families are isolated units. However, I think that the biggest failure of this book was to be unable to contemplate a solution to the problems identified that included the mothers that want to stay at home with their children. It was almost as though these mothers, having chosen perversely to put themselves in this position for longer than absolutely necessary, were excluded from consideration.
The biggest omission was the lack of understanding of breastfeeding which was mentioned in passing. The WHO does not recommend breastfeeding for 6 months only. Their advice is that babies should be exclusively breastfed for 6 months - ie only breast milk, no formula or solids - and should be breastfed after the introduction of solids until at least 2 years. Of course, no woman should feel constrained to do this if she doesn't want to, but neither should any woman feel that she is not allowed to follow the WHO's recommendations, if she feels this is right for her child. It is a convenient misunderstanding of the WHO's position on breastfeeding to say that it recommends breastfeeding for 6 months because this allows society to sanction a return to work of the mother when the baby is 6 months old. The suggestions of how breastfeeding can be continued after this age while the mother works are laughable, if rather sadly ignorant. Lack of unrestricted feeding with a 9 to 10 hour gap in the day will cause the child to switch automatically to frequent night feeding and this will make it almost impossible for most working mothers to maintain breastfeeding. As to the disruption of the breastfeeding relationship between the mother and child, who knows what effect this will have.
To truly address the problem of the lack of status of mothers which leads to their marginalization in the social, economic and personal spheres requires more than better parental leave for fathers, better involvement of fathers in the antenatal and post birth period and better daycare for children. It has to do with the status of mothers in society, the value that society puts on the family, the recognition that caring for a baby and young child is important and exhausting work. I always thought that feminism was about preventing discrimination against women in general not just working women.
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