Who Cares?
Penelope Leach
Because of our attitudes to women's rights and labour and our determined ignorance of the developmental rights of children, the comparatively little money which is spent on provision for the under-fives is almost entirely devoted to various ways of separating them from their mothers. Some theorists (still, fortunately, well-divorced from the practical world) even believe that child-rearing should become an entirely professional activity, mothers being 'freed' from all but pregnancy and labour.
While I accept that there are, and probably always will be, some mothers who truly yearn to escape from the daily care of children they may have been unwise to have, I do not believe that the numbers are nearly as great as the work statistics or the media suggest. I think that many women need only social approval and support to enable them to settle happily to full-time caring for their children. I believe that some of the women who are currently 'at work', part-time or full-time, are disillusioned with their multiply-complex lives and the concomitant guilty feeling of never doing any of it properly. If they could do so without losing cash and kudos, they too would take their children home.
If there is any truth in this, the most general help which could be given to mothers would be social 'permission' to mother wholeheartedly and clear confirmation to those who are doing so that they have their priorities right. Long-term changes in social attitudes can only be brought about by long-term education but I do not believe that we have to wait for the long-term. A great deal could be done, right now, by taking the wraps off the whole question of young children's need for individual mothering. Many people do privately believe that babies and small children need this kind of care. Many parents put the belief into practice. But the need is seldom stated, publicly and unequivocally, because spokespeople are afraid of upsetting the parents who do not. I am sorry for mothers who cannot look after their babies themselves, but I do not believe that it is helpful to conceal from them the fact that group-care is a bad alternative. They are entitled to the facts as we understand them and to help in finding alternatives to themselves rather than alternative forms of care. I am sympathetic, too, with mothers who could provide full-time care themselves but do not wish to. But they too are entitled to a true picture of the conflict between what they want and what their children need. Only when they have it can they make informed decisions and, when the decisions take them away from their children, seek 'good enough' solutions.
There is a cover-up going on and it is similar to the cover-up which used to go on over breast-feeding. It has been known for years that breast-milk was not only the best and safest baby-food but also an important protection against a variety of illnesses. But many mothers do not want to breast-feed. In deference to their feelings (and to the social arrangements which bottle-feeding makes possible) people have walked round and round those facts, dropping hints and indications but always building in comforting provisos for the bottle-feeders. With increasingly strong scientific evidence and a change in the climate of opinion, the wraps are at last coming off. It is now acceptable to state that it would be better if all mothers breast-fed their babies, at least for a few weeks. As a result, the women who already take breast-feeding for granted feel good about doing so; many waverers decide to give it a try and the number of mothers who are actually unable to produce milk drops dramatically. I believe that a similar brave clarity about individual care would produce similar results.
Since ours is an 'expert-ridden' society, the experts must start the ball rolling. Books on child-care tend to be packed with details of babies' physical development and their physical care. Each and every one of them should also contain information of the kind I have tried to summarize here, giving parents a clear picture of what is known of babies' emotional and social development and its relevance to intellectual functioning. The authors of such books tend to accept that many mothers will want to work and to quiet their consciences about the probable effects on babies by making totally unrealistic recommendations to the mothers on coping. One recent and popular book for example, does say that if a baby is not to have mother he will need someone in place of her. But it goes on to suggest nannies, mother's helps and au pairs. While these may be excellent solutions for the well-to-do, they simply beg the issue for the vast majority of families. Yet by putting them in, by implying that there are straightforward solutions available, the author blurs the issue. The reader is left with the impression that leaving the baby is acceptable, so if a mother's help is not available, but a day nursery place is, why not?
Professionally concerned organizations pussyfoot, too, both in consultations with the state and within their own areas. In the reports from which I quoted at the beginning of this book it is clear that they see it as their role to comment on the way child-care is rather than the way it could, or, dare I say it, 'ought' to be. Their work is therefore concentrated on suggestions for improving day-care within the context of its existence being taken for granted. None of them dares to take the lead in describing that existence as unfortunate and improvement as a matter of phasing it out. I too have worked on working parties. I know how difficult it is too arrive at statements, for public consumption, which all members, representing diverse groups, can agree. But I believe that it has to be done. The National Children's Bureau's official statements are as wishy-washy as all the others. Anything 'controversial' would fail to get agreement. But its chairperson uses her position to speak personally and with courage for the rights of small children to individual care and of the rights of their mothers to give it. How much longer must she remain a solitary individual voice when she is at the heart of government-sponsored research into child development? One way and another, the government sponsors the training-courses which produce all the professionals who concern themselves with small children, from nursery nurses and nursery teachers to health visitors and social workers. Yet none of these is trained to regard individual care as the ideal against which all solutions to problems in child-care must be measured. At a recent talk I gave to a group of nursery nurse trainees, one girl recounted her worries about the lack of individual attention received by children in her unit. She finished with these words: "I suppose it's true that they are better off with us. We are taught and we do know what we are doing. But when I have children of my own I shall use everything I know to look after them myself. I'd die rather than put a child of mine in the place where I work..."
When a mother gets fed up and complains to a health visitor or a social worker, perhaps suggesting that she would like to go back to the outside world of work, nobody tries to see how she could be helped to enjoy herself more where she is. 'Going back to work' is an accepted solution to maternal depression so people offer lists of day-minders rather than looking at the circumstances which are depressing her. She says that she is 'stuck in all day' and they suggest 'a little job'. They do not ask why she is 'stuck in' and discover that there is nowhere for her to go with her baby. She says that she is lonely and again a job is the obvious answer. They do not ask where her family, her friends, all the neighbours with babies, have gone to. If that mother is offered anything at all, it is a way out of rather than through her unhappiness. A way 'back to work', as if she was not working with her child. A way for her to feel 'useful and productive', as if a new person were not the most useful thing anybody could produce. A way 'to make friends', as if that baby were not panting to give and receive every aspect of companionship and as if there were not dozens of other nearby mothers who were lonely too. Because 'going back to work' is an accepted answer to moments of maternal distress, we offer a route into the guilty, harassed exhaustion of trying to do two jobs at once because doing just one of them was proving difficult. It is as zany as Alice; a 'solution' which makes things worse for both mother and child.
The media have a responsibility too. At present, mothers who are getting on with the business of caring for their own children full-time at home, are not interesting. They become so only when something 'unusual' happens - like giving birth to quads - or when they stop doing so to join the trendy world of the 'working mother', or become newsworthy because 'the authorities' take those children away. There is a vicious circle here. 'Just' being a mother is too tedious for media exposure. Because it gets no media exposure it continues to be considered tedious. So it gets no media exposure...
If as many viewing hours and column inches were devoted to home-mothering as to mothering-gone-wrong, mothering-avoided and mothering-alternatives, I think a number of important things might happen. The exposure of 'ordinary mothers' to public view would make them interesting; to themselves, to the unseen thousands who would identify with them and to the media themselves who, as we have said, first create and then believe their own mythology. Starting the ball of interest rolling would focus parents' attention on what was being done and allow them to see its importance. This would both increase the determination of those who were already giving their children full-time care and would inspire the waverers. As it became clearer to the general public that most mothers do in fact take care of their own children and that they are right to do so, the working-mother image would decline in glamour and come to be seen for what it really is: a necessity for some and a dicey option for others.
If that began to happen, all the various organizations which are dedicated to aspects of individualized care for small children, would receive new recognition and begin to be able to pursue their chosen work in an increasingly accepting atmosphere. The Pre-School Playgroups Association, the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital, the National Childbirth Trust's postnatal groups would all fit into a recognized social scheme of things. And because they would lose the faint atmosphere of 'crankiness' with which society taints them, they would gain in membership and strength. That vicious circle could be reversed so that in a few years' time working mothers of small children would feel it necessary to justify themselves for going out, just as full- time mothers now feel it incumbent upon them to prove they are not cabbages.
But 'permission', even social admiration, is clearly not enough to help for all mothers. Many women accept the need to stay at home with their small children, but wish they did not have to because they are unhappy, not only with the role but with the way of life. Still more stay at home only because they can find no way, individual or group, of having their children cared for elsewhere. To help them through their child-caring years I believe that we need to bring about a massive redeployment of the financial and professional resources currently devoted to enabling mothers to get out...
Excerpted and reprinted with permission
from the book Who Cares? A New Deal for Parents and their Young
Children by Penelope Leach, published in England by Penguin Books,
1979. Dr. Leach has updated this 1979 article with the article on
pages 124-125 because of her feeling that the particular section
of the original book from which this article is excerpted is too
out of tune with current social trends to read well as anything
but history. Dr. Leach is author of three popular books currently
available in Canada and the United States, Babyhood, The First Six
Months: coming to terms with your baby, and Your Baby & Child
published in a new and updated edition for the 90's by A. Knopf,
New York 1989.