Childcare for working families is one of those perennial problematic societal issues. From the dawn of industrialisation, it has relentlessly picked at the deep fault lines running beneath our increasingly alienated western society. The most acute issues arise in the early years of parenting, particularly caring for children under three.
What do under threes need?
In my article ‘Childhood Mental Health: why the kids are not OK’ I summarised the minimum that human beings (who, we should never forget, are an organic, evolved creature) need to build robust mental health in childhood. With respect to children under three, this is ideally served by care on domestic premises co-opted among a small circle of adults (including domestic childminders) taking ‘shifts’. It is also advantageous for infants and their circle of carers to be part of a community who regularly meet up in public spaces.
A brief history of childcare for children under three
What we know of pre-agricultural societies indicates that, prior to the development of agriculture, inter-related extended families informally shared childcare. Women carried out ‘gathering’ activities close to a base camp, while babies were carried in slings and young children played together nearby. The grandmother generation typically shared much of the load. The men of the group were frequently absent, hunting or fishing.
It is likely that men who lived past the age where they could engage in these more active tasks did take a role in childcare, but usually with the older children, teaching cultural knowledge or craft skills – the wise old man, who is often found in traditional tales, which give us some clues as to how pre-literate human societies operated.
When human beings turned to settled farming, this infant dependency within the family continued, again principally in the care of women whose daily round remained close to the home.
The industrial shift and families
As the industrial revolution unfolded it was common for working class families to designate one woman, frequently of grandparent age, to be the carer for the young children in the extended family. However, this eventually led to the scandal of ‘baby farming’.
As Britain’s national wealth grew over the Victorian era, the (male) establishment lighted on a solution: the ‘housewife’. That is, male breadwinners, and women at home caring for children.
However, being confined to a house alone with small children is not a natural condition for women, and predictably, many developed feelings of unhappiness and isolation. Being called back to the workforce during the two world wars of the twentieth century was the catalyst for women’s fight to become a part of mainstream adult society once more, through the feminist campaigns of the 1960s and 70s.
Modern times and childcare
By the mid-1990s, cultural norms had changed to both parents in full-time employment, seeking professional care for pre-school children. In the UK, the Labour government of 1997–2010 responded with the Child Care Act 2006, resulting in the creation of a state-sponsored national network of children’s Sure Start centres to oversee early years provision.
However, the Conservative government of 2010–24 shrunk Sure Start to a programme targeted at the most deprived areas. Over 1,000 children’s centres closed down and a 62% cut in funding was imposed on early years provision across the board, which eventually resulted in a significant number of closures amongst private daycare providers.
Right here, right now
This shortfall on funding additionally led to poor practice, and even some tragedies where childcare settings cut costs to the bone, negatively impacting upon staff wages and adult-child ratios. The most devastating effect of low wages has been the extent of staff turnover, which negatively impacts on infants’ abilities to form the secure relationships with adults they need during infancy to develop the foundations of robust mental health. Sadly, statutory maximum ratios of children to adults have been increased yet again under the current government.
UK families can currently access 15 hours of ‘free’ childcare per week for children aged between nine months and two years, for 38 weeks a year. This is clearly insufficient for both parents to work full time. Some may be lucky enough to get additional free support from extended family, but this requires those carers (frequently grandmothers) to make financial sacrifices of their own.
The bottom line is that a system offering high-quality childcare cannot be self-sustaining as a fully private enterprise. Where families must use the bulk of one parent’s wage to pay for childcare, this defeats the object of two parent working families.
What do other nations do about childcare?
Sweden, highly placed in Unicef’s childcare league donates a significant proportion of their gross domestic product to the provision of high-quality day care, alongside charging parents a fixed percentage of their income, so families who earn less, pay less. It also ranks in the top ten for parental leave. This combination has long been mooted by as experts as the most effective solution.
The UK was ranked 35th out of 41 nations overall, coming 36th for parental leave, 13th for access to childcare and 35th for affordability, while the United States is the only rich country without nationwide, statutory, paid maternity leave, paternity leave or parental leave.
What about dads?
Across all participating countries, fathers received less parental leave than mothers, and were less inclined to take it up, although this has recently improved in the Nordic nations, particularly Sweden, which was the first Unicef nation to introduce parental leave for fathers in the 1970s.
By contrast, in the US, women’s participation in the labour market took a huge hit during the pandemic, reaching a 33-year low in January 2021. Mothers were three times more likely than fathers to curtail their paid employment.
Given the current administration’s relentless assault on Discrimination, Equality and Inclusion policies, women are highly likely to face more challenges over the coming years.
So where to now?
It is unreasonable for young people to grow up in a society as I did in the 1970s, that presumes women’s career trajectories will inevitably be limited by motherhood. It is also just as unreasonable for them to grow up in a society that communicates to girls that they can easily ‘have it all’, as those currently in their thirties and forties did, and leave it to them to find out that the reality is far more complicated.
With infant attachment issues in mind, my own preference (as both a chartered psychologist and a grandparent), would be for a taxation threshold and rebate system to facilitate the shared care of infants under three between parents – mothers and fathers – and extended family members or other regular home-based childminders within local communities.
This would put women back at the heart of their communities, as they evolved to be. Being at home with a child should not equal being condemned to solitary confinement, as modern home-based mothers are still sadly reporting, echoing the profound loneliness previously documented by their housewife great-grandmothers.
There should also be a culture of employment that supports parents on a gradual trajectory back into the world of paid work as their children grow older; one that doesn’t construct full-time parenting as some type of detriment to the economy or to the individual. Grandparents should not be looking at taking a financial ‘hit’ for providing childcare, either in their current employment, or in their future pension payout.
The core problem
The core problem current western society has is its reluctance to admit that it constructs children – and other vulnerable groups – as inconvenient parcels to park as cheaply as possible, expecting healthy adults of working age to put their entire focus upon relentlessly growing the economy.
Not only do we have fragile childcare facilities compelled to run on corporate lines, we have also condemned our education facilities to corporatisation and corruption. Our medical facilities now serve parsimony rather than humanity, high streets are dying due to the ability of megacorporations to crush every competitor in their path, and public services and utilities serve directors and shareholders, frequently owned by corporations that are not even located in the same nation as service users. ‘Poop on the beaches’ has, in Britain, become a poignant symbol of all that is wrong with our current socio-political environment.
What should never be forgotten, however, is that our progress towards this state of affairs has been paved by the smashing of the local communities that are the natural habitat of human beings, replacing local services with faceless megacorporations dominated by billionaires that turn ordinary people into drones to build profits for their directors and shareholders.
Future-proofing humanity
Children have suffered greatly in this process, as their social care and education services have been swallowed up within this culture. In terms of early years care, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation propose:
“A lightly regulated market with underfunded subsidies… risk exacerbating existing problems like unaffordable costs, sufficiency gaps, low worker pay and variable quality… [and] excess profiteering.”
It will take a while, and a focused collective will to roll back this half century of community destruction. But, surely, we can make a small beginning now by raising our youngest citizens in an environment where their humanity, social and emotional needs are fully recognised, with a view to providing them with the social and emotional robustness to cope with the political, economic and above all, ecological turmoil that will be the backdrop to the remainder of the 21st century.
