EXCERPTS
Cue pursed lips and disapproval: while feckless mothers sneak off to enjoy themselves in the workplace, "record numbers" of children under 5 are going to day nurseries. Almost 12,000 of these institutions now tend to 704,200 children, representing a rise of 31 per cent in five years and providing ample fodder for a rash of social studies showing that children thus cared for become more disobedient and disruptive than those looked after by their mothers at home.
In fact, most of the small print also adds that such irritating behaviour is only marginally increased and it has also been shown that the nursery alumni go on to do better both at school and later in life.
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But no matter. The guilt-inducing damage to parents is already done by the implicit perpetuation of the most tenacious of contemporary myths: that young children historically, traditionally and therefore properly have grown up under the constant, vigilant, hands-on care of their mothers.
The truth is that this has never been the case. Further: it is not the part-time mother who has been fashioned by and for modern woman; it is the full-time mother who is recent &emdash; a construct, actually, of only the past three or four decades. Before that, women had neither the time, the luxury nor, in many cases, the inclination to devote their waking hours to the raising of their children.
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The nuclear family, progeny of the Industrial Revolution and its requirement for smaller, more mobile units of workforce, heralded the division of labour whereby he worked outside the home, she in it; he brought home the bacon, she cooked it. And from the late 18th century right up until, perhaps, the late 1960s &em; oh boy, did she earn her keep.
My grandmother had only a pantry, my mother a small fridge. There were no freezers and no supermarkets to fill them, so shopping was a daily trudge because, of course, women didn't drive. Washing took a whole, miserable, steamy Monday of mangles and pegs and lines, carpets came clean by beating and floors by scrubbing, biscuits and scones weren't bought but sifted, rubbed and baked. The practice of childcare (a word as yet not invented) involved a kindly but determined shooing "outside to play", whereupon we happily scarpered until teatime rumbled tummies.
My mother taught us to read, then largely left us to it; she would try to sit down for a cuddle come Andy Pandy, even though when she did it was often the only time she sat all day. Everybody's mother was exactly the same; none of us felt deprived in any way &emdash; but to call us a full-time task would have been as inaccurate as it would have been unwelcome.
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Only now, this now of domestic labour-saving devices and Tesco home deliveries and SUVs for school-runs, only now might the woman who eschews the labour market call herself &emdash; in the absence of anything else she has to do &emdash; a full-time mother. And bully for her, if it is what she chooses, if she has found someone else to pay for it, if she is immune to accusations of indulgence and idleness or if she believes, as many sincerely do, that her permanent presence is in the better interests of her children.
But if she then justifies her choice, in the process provoking unease in parents who have chosen otherwise, by suggesting that it is she who adheres to a proven, time-honoured pattern for child-rearing, then it is she &emdash; not they &emdash; who is wrong.
- reprinted from the London Times