Tweet
Another report seems to blame working mothers for a problem whose true origin is social inequality
Children want to spend more time with their busy working parents. The guilt, the guilt. Unicef's latest report on British parenting prompted the kind of headline that strikes panic into working mothers. "It feels so true," lamented a colleague, recounting her speedy straw poll among working mothers on her way to the office. One admitted her daughter had seen her for 15 minutes that morning as she was watching the news and on her rowing machine, and there would be another 15 before bed. Another who works at home confessed she holes up in her study and daren't go to the toilet for fear of being assailed by her needy toddler. Maternal guilt, it seems, is a persistent beast.
To make matters worse, the Unicef report's depressing commentary on UK parenting coincides with the release of the film of I Don't Know How She Does It, the 1990s Allison Pearson novel. The plot, you may remember, has an overworked banker mother seeing the error of trying to "have it all"; she gives up her high-profile job to focus on lurve, baby and husband – the most old-fashioned message of all.
One might have thought 30 years into the social revolution of working motherhood that we would have unravelled some of our insecurities. Not to mention that we might have moved beyond Pearson's insights; we discovered exactly how she did it over a decade ago – by exhausting herself. Since then there's been a big growth in part-time work (particularly for women), some modest improvements in childcare and a big increase in the expectation of men pulling their weight: incremental improvements now being put under unprecedented strain by spending and job cuts. But no, subjects such as motherhood and children's happiness have a strange way of circling unresolved, like aeroplanes waiting for a landing slot.
So are there grounds for the instinctive guilt response? The fact is, surveys show mothers and fathers are spending more time with their children than ever, but we have higher expectations of parenting. Did upper-class Victorian mothers suffer pangs of guilt when they only spent an hour with their children in the evening? Or the working-class mother who might have to leave parenting largely to older siblings while they worked? Of course not.
Unicef talks of a time squeeze in UK families but we need to be much more specific about where it hits. This is not a problem of working mothers per se, but a problem at the two extreme ends of the labour market: the high-status professional and, at the other end of the scale, the low-income parent struggling with two jobs to make ends meet. But those in the middle, juggling the commitments of family and work, are investing more energy and effort than many previous generations in their children. This is not an argument for complacency – far from it, more help is badly needed for low-income families – but a plea against guilt-tripping and panic.
Inevitably, the Unicef report – like its predecessor in 2007, which ranked child wellbeing in the UK among the lowest in the OECD – will be spun by different interest groups to fit their own cause. It feeds into David Cameron's "broken Britain" thesis and the routine way in which ministers now use the adjective "feral". The report claims that parents in the UK seem to have less confidence about setting boundaries than their counterparts in Spain and Sweden. But a note of caution: the research was based on 24 families and 250 children across three countries; that's a small sample, and the insights it thus offers might be interesting, but they aren't definitive.
The toplines of the report were all about a shortage of parental time – but dig into the report, and there is a much more powerful story about the complex way in which inequality affects children's sense of wellbeing and adults' capacity to parent effectively. Status feeds into confident parenting, but the former seems particularly tightly linked to economic status in the UK. Consumption of expensive brands is perceived by parents and children as a way of dealing with social insecurities in a way it is not perceived in Spain and Sweden. Why?
We don't really know, although surely relevant is the "strong and shared social expectation of family" evident in both Spain and Sweden, an alternative value system to challenge materialism. Worryingly, the report conducted this research in late 2010, before the cuts in services for children. It exposes the growing credibility problem facing this government with its much-vaunted claims to being family friendly and improving national wellbeing, while the reality is that inequality is weighing ever more heavily on low-income families and their children. That's where the debate should be, not maternal guilt.
Madeleine Bunting
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
More...
