Daycare, daycare, out of school hours care,

pre-school and grandparent care. By the time most children are five they have seen more of other adults than the people who are supposed to be their parents. 

Yesterday I had a brief conversation with a young mother who is about to go back to work. She has been one of the "lucky" ones whose employer had given her six months maternity leave and held her job open for her. 

"I know I'm lucky," she told me, "So many mums don't get the same opportunity I've had...but I still wish I did not have to go back to work." 

She is going back to work "because we need the money". They are buying a house and run two cars. The new baby is her first "and probably the only one". She thinks they "probably won't be able to afford another". At the same time she "loves motherhood". 

There is something wrong here. Her six month old child is about to enter the "care" system. All the love and attention her little one has been given is now going to be replaced by expensive group care and this will likely continue until the child is considered old enough to be trusted to care for itself.

I bit my tongue and said nothing about how little this person will actually be earning. By the time she has paid out for the sort of day care required I suspect that "going back to work" will not actually increase their income by any significant amount - if at all. Even if she was presented with the actual figures I doubt very much it would convince this person that it might be better to stay at home. Her own "career" depends on returning to work and she has been told, and told often, that her own career is too important to stop work and be a full time parent and partner.

Of course I grew up in a generation when many mothers did not "go to work". They worked as unpaid carers, as child minders, as parent minders, as canteen ladies at the school, as volunteers in other places. They cooked and cleaned, washed and ironed, gardened, made their clothes and ours, heard our "reading" and read to us - and much more. They did all this but they did not "work". Those were just things that mothers did. 

Were they really that "bored" and "unfulfilled"? I am not sure where that came from but I rather doubt it. My memory is of women who worked. They worked hard.

Now it seems they are still expected to do much of that and go to work as well. They have more "labour saving" devices and pre-prepared food, clothes can be flung in a washing machine and do not need to be ironed, the "garden" is "easy care" and some of them will make time to "hear reading" but the bedtime story might well be a DVD or a YouTube video.  Their pre-schooler will know about the "correct pronouns" and "global warming" from their day at pre-school even if they do not know about Peter Rabbit eating too much and Christopher Robin jumping in puddles. 

Something has gone wrong somewhere. The supposed "social-emotional benefits" and the "economic benefits" for the full time return to work might be there but I doubt it. Passing over the care of your child allows for politically correct indoctrination to take place of course. We still seem to believe that even when the problems raised by Soviet or Communist or even some of the kibbutz style child care have become obvious. 

But "mothering" is not important is it? It is some sort of old-fashioned gender based fallacy isn't it? 

Watching that young mother interacting with her young baby I must be too old. I have this odd idea that mothering is important - more important than "going to work".  It just seems wrong that people can no longer afford to work at mothering.