As anyone who’s tried to balance a career with a family knows, what we do is practically impossible. That we manage to get it done: raise our children, keep our jobs, is a miracle owing much to our do-or-die spirit, and very little to a culture that pays lip service to the family while making it extremely hard to take care of one, especially in this kind of economy.
Dr. Penelope Leach, author of a massive new four-year study, the largest in the history of the UK, has now written what may be the definitive reference book on child care of all kinds — care by the mother, by the father, by grandparents, by nursery schools, and by daycare centres. She doesn’t say — and how refreshing is this! — that full-time care by the mother is the gold standard (although the press has tried to interpret it that way), and she doesn’t scold anyone for choosing childcare outside the home. What she does do is detail the advantages and disadvantages of each form of care, and suggest that each family ought to select the kind of care that best fits its own unique situation. Her research in a nutshell: “The quality of care matters much more than the kind of care.”
That such a straightforward, non-judgmental book should be so revolutionary is a sign of how polarised we’ve become on matters of working vs. staying home. Babble called Dr. Leach at her home in Cornwall to see if she could help us put the child care conundrum in perspective. — Ada Calhoun
Your book really starts a whole new conversation about childcare. Unlike what seems like every book out there on the subject, it’s not about how women should stay home or go to work!
Well we certainly needed a new conversation, I felt! [Laughs]
I particularly enjoyed the little dialogue box on page 94 where you start out a conversation with a mother about how she feels full-time at-home mother care is the very best kind of care for all babies and by the end she has a million qualifiers. So you don’t idealise full-time stay-at-home motherhood?
That’s right. In effect, that was my motivation for writing the book. In the course of my research, we learned otherwise, and yet you still end up with people seeing mother care as the gold standard and everything else as being lesser, whether that’s care by the father or something else. In my own study we had 1,200 families and there were some pretty awful full-time mothers among them! [Laughs] The truth is, it depends. Who are we talking about? What mother? What family? What child? That’s why I don’t think there’s a lot to be said for generalising. People say to me, What kind of care is the best for a baby? And really the best I can do is give certain indicators of high-quality care. It just depends.
It’s amazing how rare it is that an expert will say, “It depends.”
I came out of this study feeling very strongly that this is one area in life where choice is absolutely vital, and where women in particular have a right to choose. They have to choose. Their ability to choose is what ensures the baby’s care will be good, whether that means staying home or going back to work. What’s bad is when the mother wants to go back to work but can’t find childcare, or the other way around where she desperately wants to stay home but can’t afford to. And I’m afraid that may be more often the case now because of the economic crash.
It is a very hard time to be a parent of young children.
Unless you are singularly gifted: a highly qualified mother with a loving grandmother living around the corner, a devoted husband wants to be involved, and a very understanding boss who will do anything rather than lose you. Unfortunately, that isn’t a large percentage of us.
One thing I think our readers will be very happy to hear from your research is that even if you work long hours, your child won’t forget you. I think many of us fear that if we go on a business trip or something, we’ll come back to a child saying, “And you are?”
I was rather shocked in my own research by how many parents genuinely believe that if they find a really good caretaker for their child, the child might come to love the nanny more. That is one of those rare cases where we can actually say, “No chance. Not going to happen.” Unless the parent is separated from the child almost entirely from the very beginning, it just doesn’t happen. It’s actually quite surprising where children have had nannies for years, parents worry that when the nanny leaves the children will be terribly upset and actually as long as everything remains stable with the parents, they’re really not very. Yes, they’re sad to see her go, but she’s not the centre of their world.
I was surprised that you say time outs aren’t an indicator of high-quality care. Why is that?
The problem with time outs is that children who have not yet learned to self-control need an adult to control them until they can get back together. They don’t need a time out; they need a time in. By all means, if a child is throwing a tantrum in a restaurant, you remove that child so everyone else can get on with their dinner, but I don’t think time outs work as a discipline strategy for young children. I believe in time ins.
What’s the first step you think the government should take on the issue of early childcare?
[The U.S] is the most influential nation in the world and the only one other than Australia that has no paid parental leave. Every study shows these incredible financial reasons to invest in young children; it’s said that for every dollar put into early childcare, it pays off something like seven dollars down the road. Everyone agrees that it’s more important than almost anything else… so we don’t do it.
Why do think think that is?
I have a sense that part of the reason is that a lot of Americans actually don’t realise it’s possible. I think mothers in the U.S. don’t believe that U.K. mothers are really entitled to nine months of paid leave! We all need good education and we need children’s healthcare. I’m not an American, so I hate to say this, but I think your lack of those things has to be seen as a kind of disgrace.
Well, thank you so much for speaking with us. It’s so refreshing to read some actual evidence on the subject rather than another diatribe about what women should be doing. Usually if it isn’t Why aren’t you working more? it’s worship of stay-at-home mums.
If you’re at stay-at-home mum, of course you’ll go buy that book and feel good about it. But it would be good to think: Why am I doing it this way? Is it working for me? Is it working for my children?
Click here to buy Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone.
Maybe you could remove the link to Laura Schlesinger’s book that forms part of the review. I’d hate to think that Babble would be seen as endorsing that dreck.
A link does not imply endorsement -ed.