We’ve got it wrong when a ‘working mother’ means someone who isn’t at home

10th March 2008
By Dr Richard House

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In her article ‘Born to be loved’ (Parliamentary Brief, February 2008), childhood campaigner Sue Palmer made a compelling case for love being at the centre of early childhood experience.

I have always been taken aback by the extent to which we British seem to find it difficult explicitly to speak about love in these kinds of policy contexts, on early-years practitioner trainings and so forth, as if the fashionable ‘developmental-obsessiveness’ of early childhood education has generated a utilitarian mindset which can so easily forget the simplest and yet most crucial aspects of early human experience.

How else, for example, do young children learn about and fully embody love, both its joys and its vicissitudes, except in quality loving relationships with adults whom they love, and who unpossessively love them?

It is surely parents who are normally best placed by far to give children a nourishing early experience of love and care; and the influence of attachment theory in cultural awareness is now such that it is thankfully safe to make such erstwhile ‘politically incorrect’ assertions without risking accusations of being anti-women or unduly patriarchal.

Indeed, there is compelling evidence from a recent RED magazine survey of 2,500 women that points to a significant shift in woman’s attitude to the child-rearing/ career balance, from one in the 1980s when the drive for women to have careers was predominent, to one in which, today, the central importance of family life and early child-rearing seems to be reasserting itself in present-day consciousness.

Profound questions arise in all this for policy-makers right across the public sector. Palmer is quite clear, and I agree with her, that an institutional environments for a young child is decisively inferior to a ‘good-enough’ familial milieu (to use the term coined by the famous paediatrician D.W. Winnicott).

It follows from this that the government should make every effort to minimise the extent to which children’s early lives are institutionalised — and all the existing research supports this conclusion.

Yet the government also clearly has a legitimate concern for those children whose family circumstances are not ‘good enough’; and in those cases, the true art of joined-up policy-making is to find a way to enhance the lives of these often multiply disadvantaged children without adversely affecting all other young children who are not in need of such well-intentioned intervention.

The danger of using the relatively blunt, catch-all mechanism of the new Early Years Foundation Stage framework to tackle disavantage, for example, is that whilst its compulsory ‘early learning goals’ might be of net benefit to disadvantaged children, it could well have the opposite effect on those children in good-enough environments — and these are complexities and subtleties which cannot be ignored by policy-makers if their interventions are not to risk becoming counter-productive.

But there are arguably wider forces at work in all this. I start from the premise that there is no logical reason why any given economic system will necessarily be consistent with, and enable, the kind of high-quality early experience that children need.

If, to take the example of Britain in 2008, the operation of a relatively free market economy and its associated employment market inevitably generate a situation in which early high-quality family life is a casualty of the market’s unintended side-effects, then it is also surely the government’s responsibility to find creative solutions which mitigate those worst aspects of the free market.

This is an issue that must transcend parochial party politics, and it is one on which Right, Left and Centre can and must surely agree.

So what kinds of creative political solutions might be available such that early childhood is protected from the market’s unintended consequences, and the care and love of young children is given the primacy they require in modern culture?

First, as already mentioned, it is crucial that government only intervenes where intevention is unambiguously necessary. For as the family therapist Steve Biddulph recently said at an ‘Open EYE’ campaign conference, what is needed is sensitively and carefully targeted help and support (including emotional support) for those families and communities that need it; something that is surely not beyond the capacity of a government with the will to bring it about.

Second, we need to look to the fiscal system and to employers for further creative responses. We need to proclaim the message that the nurturing of today’s young is in everyone’s interests, including today’s business managers and those businesses’ shareholders, for it is the future life of their own children that is at stake in all this.

Short-termist, balance-sheet type thinking simply won’t do when the well-being of the next generation is at stake.

On this view, we need clear political and ‘emotionally literate’ leadership on these issues, with ministers and shadow ministers leading public and business opinion on the importance of early childhood and the need for it to take precedence over ‘the needs of the economy’.

Finally, we arguably need some radical new thinking about how the fiscal system might be fine-tuned, or even re-designed, to support early childhood.

MP Frank Field, for example, has made some interesting proposals along these lines. In his 2004 Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture, Field suggested that there may well exist direct causal links between the current epidemic of anti-social behaviour, the low value society puts on parenting and motherhood and the pressures of a consumer society — all of which tend to work together in encouraging or even forcing mothers of young children into the workforce.

Field suggested that government might look at ‘an endowment of motherhood’ to make the choice of looking after very young children full-time a real one. He proposed an endowment of £24,000 over the first two years of a child’s life, ‘a sum which could be covered by paying a quarter of the value of the help taxpayers already give to families in the form of child benefit and child tax allowance over a child’s first sixteen years’.

In conclusion, early childhood experience is just too important to be left to the unpredictable vagaries of the free globalised market economy. Those who are campaigning for childhood and children would strongly urge politicians to seek a consensual, non-partisan way forwards in these questions.

When institutionalised early child care threatens to become an unquestioned cultural norm, flying in the face of all we know about the importance of early attachment relationships for lifelong health, then urgent action is surely needed by those in a position to do something about it.

Certainly, future generations will not easily forgive the current policy-making class if they fail to rise effectively to this most urgent of 21st century challenges.

Richard House is Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling at Roehampton University, an NHS counsellor, a publishing editor, and an early-years Steiner teacher. richardahouse@hotmail.com

Filed Under: , Childhood, , Motherhood
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