It's Not Shameful to Want Others to Help Us Care for Our Children

Where has the urgency gone when it comes to childcare? I know it’s an urgent issue, and thousands of families know that it’s an urgent issue. Debates about it are taking place everywhere, from park playgrounds to thinktank conference rooms, and yet nothing much seems to be changing.

Every now and again a government reform dribbles out piecemeal: short-term funding to enable better-qualified people to go into nursery work; or yet another layer of tax credits or vouchers to give partial help with the costs of childcare to those families who are sufficiently numerate to disentangle their entitlements. But the great need that lies at the heart of so many families’ experiences is still not being addressed.

I know that childcare is far from the only hurdle when it comes to getting the right balance between work and family life. There are vital battles to be fought on getting fathers to participate more in caring, on challenging the overwork culture, and on providing more financial help for parents staying at home. Those all constitute essential building blocks to progress, but we are often bypassing the continuing need for better childcare.

The result of the current poor balance between work and family life, as the IPPR report published this week makes clear, is that many women are simply choosing not to have so many babies. Are they learning from those women who have found that as soon as they do have children their choices evaporate? The pressure is intense when you have children, either to work like crazy to afford very expensive childcare, so losing out on the irreplaceable joy of family life, or to stop working altogether and find yourself losing out on the fun, status and income of working life. Feminists, novelists, journalists and campaigners have been banging on about the need for a better balance between work and home for many years, yet it is still a distant dream for too many families.

I am incredibly lucky in this way, since the kind of work I do means I can go on with it and still pick my daughter up from school more often than not. But being a self-employed writer is not what most women do. Most employers are still dragging their heels over making flexible work viable, and most part-time work is not sufficiently well rewarded to allow women to buy in good-quality childcare.

How can we leapfrog this great barrier to women’s equality and inject more urgency into this debate? One way is to stop framing the argument around childcare as if it’s a stand-up fight between two uncompromising positions - neither of which are that enticing. Those positions are full-time stay-at-home motherhood on the one hand, and full-time childcare in nurseries on the other. This is the stark alternative sold to us by almost everyone, especially guilt-inducing "experts" such as Steve Biddulph, who gets massive attention for saying that the mother should stay home in the first year and that nurseries are no good for kids under two years.

If you don’t buy into this stark alternative then it’s hard to get your voice heard. But most parents do not go for full-time parenting, nor do they drop their kids off at full-time nursery as soon as they can and rush off to work. That’s because we really don’t need any parenting experts to tell us that nurseries can be horribly cold and unresponsive places for babies. Many parents do listen to their hearts and don’t want to hear the sad cries of their children as they leave them in a room with a stranger run ragged by the needs of three or more babies.

That doesn’t mean we don’t want any childcare. What does the care we want actually look like? Looking at my own situation and those of the parents I know, I can see that many parents are setting up a kind of patchwork of care. It might be part-time nanny or child minder care in the first two years, adding in part-time nursery care after that, switching to an au pair once the child is older, and with friends and one’s own parents filling in the gaps.

Where that combination of care works - and it can work, wonderfully well - it does so because it puts the needs of a child to the fore. Of course young children need a close, loving bond with their carer, but the best childcare workers know this and succeed in providing it. What parents want is to be financially enabled to make various choices at various times, which necessarily entails tax relief on all forms of childcare. At the moment the financial help on offer for home-based care is absurdly overcomplicated, a mixture of tax credits for low-income families and vouchers delivered through companies. In its baroque stinginess it is failing too many families. It is also failing too many childcare workers, who are forced to work for low pay or in the black economy because parents still can’t afford to pay them properly. We badly need a more straightforward and generous system of tax relief that delivers for all families using all kinds of carers, so that women can make the choices they want to make.

One reason why the urgency has gone out of this debate is because women feel ashamed talking about their desire for childcare at all. It’s OK to argue for better funding for parents to spend time with their kids - which, yes, has to be part of the equation - but it makes you feel like a bad mum if you also talk about employing other care. But we shouldn’t feel ashamed of wanting to bring in other people to give our children love and care alongside us. At its best, good childcare need not impoverish childhood, and can provide a wider circle of people for a child to love and enjoy.

The shame that has surrounded this issue means that what I think is the best kind of care for babies other than parental care - nannies based in the family home - are still the preserve of the wealthy minority. But it’s horribly elitist to say that it should stay that way, and that more families shouldn’t be enabled to buy in home-based care if they want to.

This issue also suffers from the over personalization of all feminist debate. Women who struggle to set up the right childcare for their families tend to see it as a purely personal struggle, and a purely personal failing if they can’t find the right care at their income level. That means we have lost sight of the need for the state to enable parents who are not hugely wealthy to make the choices they want.

I have said that it’s women who struggle to set up the childcare, because by and large this is the case. You don’t hear many men talking about the cost of childcare, about how they worry about whether the nursery workers are giving their child enough love, about the problems of leaving their own child with a child minder, about their feelings of guilt about having to ask the nanny to stay late. Men’s work is still predicated on this hidden unpaid and low-paid work by women, and they are still not prepared to face up to it, even though one or two, such as Steve Biddulph, may he happy to publicly harangue women who don’t seem to be doing it properly. Perhaps we will never get an honest debate about childcare until men see it as their issue too. In the meantime, it is women who struggle.