'tis the season and all that

We are officially on holiday.

The office Christmas parties have been and gone. The Christmas tree has been shedding its fake fir finery over the floor for a few weeks (and that alliteration wasn’t even on purpose!) There are only six windows left to open on our Advent calendar. 

And this will be my last post of 2012 (‘amen!’ sigh the readers in relief)

I’ve been thinking about what to write for this year's final post. Last year, I took a light-hearted look at labour and childbirth in the original Christmas story. This year, I’m not feeling quite so jolly, or, at least, not yet. Each day seems to bring a fresh horror visited on the children of this planet: they are victims of war in Syria, Palestine and Israel, Afghanistan and the Congo (to name a few), a mass-stabbing in China, another US school shooting, as well as the less-headline-grabbing victims of child-trafficking, recession, and poverty.  And even some of those children who are privileged by comparison spend the holidays negotiating new family configurations, and experiencing the stresses and strains of the holiday season. 

As I was wondering what to write about this year, two items on the internet caught my attention: one an opinion piece by a mother on her contented child being the result of good parenting rather than just luck, and the other President Obama’s speech following the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. 

In the first piece, the mother of a young son wrote about the way in which she bristled whenever people told her how ‘lucky’ she was to have such a settled baby. Luck, in her view, wasn’t the whole story, as ‘according to the parenting books, we haven't exactly been the ideal parents’. With a similar antipathy towards parenting books to that described in my previous post, these parents have sought instead to respond to their baby’s cues for food, sleep and clean nappies, rather than try and conform to someone else’s schedule. As a result, the writer concludes, they have a baby who sleeps ten-plus hours a night, has been sick once in ten months and has met or exceeded every developmental milestone. While I wasn’t over-fond of her implied judgement of other parents whose offspring weren’t so co-operative - there are plenty of parents who feed on demand and let their children sleep when they want to sleep who don’t get a good night’s sleep, for example - I liked her broader point about the way in which the work of parenting was met by dismissive ‘you’re so luckys’ that rendered it invisible and inconsequential. Good parenting does matter, it is hard, and everyone - regardless of whether they have children of their own - will reap the benefits from it.

In the second piece, one which will no doubt be read and heard by a great deal more people than the first, President Obama spoke about the need for the US to do better by its children. Without ever mentioning the word ‘gun’, he clearly indicated that it was time for the US to change its gun culture, which, in Newtown, resulted in the murder of twenty six- and seven-year-olds, along with some of the adults who took care of them. President Obama spoke at length about raising children, and about the ways in which children were brought up not only by their parents and immediate family, but also by the wider community. He said:

"It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realise no matter how much you love these kids, you can't do it by yourself, that this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community and the help of a nation.

And in that way we come to realise that we bear responsibility for every child, because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we're all parents, that they are all our children.

This is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations?"

Obama’s conclusion was ‘no’, that there was more to do, and he was going to do everything in his power to try and achieve that. History will show whether he - and the wider communities that he leads - will be successful.

Both pieces resonated with me: the former emphasised individual responsibility, and the need to ‘teach your children well’ (as Crosby Stills Nash and Young once sang); the latter reminded its listeners of their and our collective responsibilities, that ‘teaching them well is something we can only do together.’ 

It is fitting that both these reminders, albeit the latter in tragic and totally un-wanted circumstances, come at the beginning of the holiday season. 

Christmas - the holiday with which I am most familiar - may be starting ever earlier each year as shops groan under the weight of consumer goods to go under the tree. But, in celebrating the exchange of gifts and the sharing of meals, it is also drawing on something more powerful and less ideological than mere capitalism. In the 1920s, French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote in his most famous work The Gift that the exchange of objects established and cemented relationships between groups and between individuals in a variety of societies. This exchange established the central principle of reciprocity and fostered social solidarity as well as self-interest. In doing so it created obligations, responsibilities and duties between people, families, adults and children.

While we’re counting our presents along with our blessings these holidays, we would also do well to remember the relational responsibilities that are inscribed in every gift: those new socks and chocolates (to our immediate family, friends and neighbours), that yummy lunch (to all the people - locally, nationally, and internationally - that had a role in preparing it), and that statutory holiday (to the national community).

Because if children are a gift, and a gift to their communities as well as their parents, then we all have obligations for their care and wellbeing.

And, on that note, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays!

Books etc

Have no fear, I am not about to launch this post by saying that my two year-old is now able to read. She certainly enjoys books, and a combination of the pictures and (incredibly) repetitive reading means she can now reel off by heart the words in some of her books. But proper reading of unfamiliar words - in fact, of any words - is still a ways off yet.

No, the subject of this post, is books about child-bearing and child-rearing, more particularly, my antipathy towards them. I’m not the only one it seems. Novelist Rachel Cusk describes them in this way:

There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must relearn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. (A Life’s Work, p 111)

I don’t want to totally slate these kind of books, nor criticise people for relying on them. At times, particularly in the first year of my baby’s life, I was as much in need of support and advice as anyone. I have talked with many people - other new mothers and fathers, experienced parents, health professionals - and I have read a few books, looked online and dipped into books and magazines. But my forays into child-bearing and rearing manuals - no matter how well-intentioned - have led me to conclude that Cusk, in her supercilious way, may be right: that they can work to undermine confidence even as they seek to reassure; that they can serve to distance a parent from their child - who becomes an object to be analysed or a problem to be solved - even as they emphasise responding sensitively to each child’s individuality and difference. 

I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a conscious agenda of disempowerment on the part of the writers - much as it isn’t on the part of self-help books that exhort you to ‘Love Yourself’ and then give you tips on how to get your hair and makeup just-right. Rather, it seems to me that these contradictions help drive a process that effectively polices parents, especially new parents, and especially mothers. 

Recent research by historian Angela Davies has shown that childcare manuals by authors from Dr Spock to Gina Ford have been setting the bar too high and, for 50 years, mothers have felt more powerless, not less, after reading their words of wisdom. Davis carried out 160 interviews with women of all ages and from all backgrounds to explore their experiences of motherhood. In Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000, she says every manual designed to offer support and advice to women has had the opposite effect, leaving them dispirited and feeling inadequate. She says:  

Despite all the differences in advice advocated by these childcare 'bibles' over the years, it is interesting that they all have striking similarities in terms of how the experts presented their advice. Whatever the message, the advice was given in the form of an order and the authors highlighted extreme consequences if mothers did not follow the methods of child-rearing that they advocated. Levels of behaviour these childcare manuals set for mothers and babies are often unattainably high, meaning women could be left feeling like failures when these targets were not achieved. So while women could find supportive messages, some also found the advice more troubling. (Davis quoted in the Guardian)

Ordinarily a lover of books, I haven’t immersed myself in these ones, not least because in the weary times I wasn’t caring for my new baby, the very last thing I wanted to do was read about caring for babies. In fact, one of the first books I read after leaving the hospital and figuring out which day of the week it was was not What to Expect in Your Baby’s First Year but Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk! I have dipped into them in times when I wasn’t sure about something - or done the online equivalent - but something stopped me from devouring them in pursuit of the secrets of good motherhood. 

Now, as this blog attests, this didn’t stop me reading about experiences of motherhood itself. Far from it. I have read books by novelists exploring their own experiences of motherhood, whether fictional (Margaret Drabble) or non-fictional (Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk). I have read about the experiences of professional women who have combined the insights of their working lives with their personal experiences of mothering (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Stephanie Coontz, Sue Kedgley). I have read the polemical works of feminist mothers (Adrienne Rich, Naomi Wolf, Elisabeth Badinter). And many more besides. 

Where these books - of which, it sometimes seems there are numbers now to rival the What to Expect, Baby Whisperer and Contented Baby ilk - differ from the how-to manuals is that, where they move beyond the ground of personal experience (and not all of them do), they seek to empower rather than undermine, to foster solidarity rather than individually guilt-trip, to analyse and critique rather than simply accept. One could argue that some of these approaches may alienate mothers who don’t wish to engage with the more political aspects of mothering, rather than the day-to-day business of it. That may well be the case. But what they don’t do is tell you how to do it nor imply consciously or not that you could be doing it wrong and you should be thinking about how you will get it right or pay the consequences at all times.

Elsewhere, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels trace the ways in which parental advice books have proliferated since the 1980s, as part of the ideology of what they call the ‘new momism.’ This has happened in parallel to the increasing dominance of neo-liberalism and the development of ‘turbo-capitalism’. As Susan Gregory Thomas outlines in Buy Baby Buy, this period also saw an explosion of toys and other materials aimed at parents. Similarly, the profusion of how-to books offer up the enticing proposition that good parenting can be bought and sold, that the secret to raising happy children is as simple as making the right purchase. And no matter how well the books of such high-profile feminists as Naomi Wolf might sell, they would be well below the sales figures and brand proliferation enjoyed by the likes of the What to Expect range.

When it comes to childcare books, it seems that making parents feel bad is pretty good for business.

review: Mother Nature

I was prompted to read this book after wondering about a gut reaction I had had to a picture of a dog suckling a cat posted on a breastfeeding support website. The picture made me uncomfortable. Well, not so much the picture itself, as the context in which it appeared, particularly as it was posted shortly after a woman’s story of how she found comfort and connection in her role as a newly-nursing mother by watching the nursing chimpanzees at the zoo. ‘I am not an animal,’ I raged to myself. ‘I am not a chimpanzee or a dog or a cat.’  

Now, of course, the latter might be true, but the former is not. I am an animal of the species called homo sapiens. But I am also aware - given my human facility for reasoning, empathy, and symbolic language - that ‘animalising’ other humans - that is, seeing them as somehow less than human - is a means by which gross atrocities such as colonialism, slavery, and genocide have been committed. The basic concept that all homo sapiens are human underpinned the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the end of the second world war.

And, as Hillary Clinton powerfully said in 1995, ‘women’s rights are human rights’. Seeing women as not quite human, then, can potentially lead to the denial of human rights, including basic rights to life, liberty, security of the person and self-determination. This has been appallingly demonstrated recently in the case of Savita Halappanavar, a woman who this year died of blood-poisoning after doctors refused to uphold her right to life over that of the slowly dying fetus within her. With a gruesome irony, the fetus was female. 

Now, de-humanising women is by no means what either the new mother or the breastfeeding support people were advocating. Rather, they were emphasising the no-less political point that breastfeeding is a normal biological function that human females share with other mammals. As such, it should be respected, celebrated and normalised, both on the level of societal comfort and societal support (e.g. statutory parental leave, paid breastfeeding breaks). I support that position and have little argument with it. 

And yet ...

I couldn’t silence my gut feeling that something did not quite sit right with me about the comparison. Perhaps it was being likened to a ‘dairy cow’ when I was breastfeeding myself. Perhaps it was something more. 

Elsewhere, during the course of my reading, I had come across several references to primatologist, anthropologist and sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and the Shaping of the Species (2000 - interestingly, I have come across several different subtitles for this book!). Perhaps this book would help me find some answers.

Or perhaps not.

French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter - whose early work Hrdy admires - criticises Mother Nature for its perpetuation of the ideology of ‘naturalism’, which has ‘as its core a belief that the world is governed by natural principles‘ (The Conflict, pp 29-30). Despite Hrdy’s nuanced approach and her demonstration of social, political, cultural and historical maternal diversity, Badinter contends that Hrdy refuses to let go a belief in innate instinct. In response to Hrdy’s discussion of lactation as the crucial ingredient in mother-infant attachment, the source of so-called maternal instincts, Badinter asks ‘if breastfeeding is the trigger for maternal attachment, what of those who have never breastfed, as is the case with millions of mothers. Do they love their children any less than those who breastfeed?’ (The Conflict, p 53). Hrdy does, in fact, address this later in her book when she categorically dismisses the idea of the critical bonding period immediately post-birth: ‘Children can be adopted days after birth and loved just as intensely, as ferociously, as those babies whose bodies passed through their mother’s birth canal and then pressed against her right after birth (p 538).’ 

Judith Warner, by contrast, thinks that Badinter got Hrdy’s argument wrong:

Hrdy ... has argued ... in ... “Mother Nature” (the chief argument of which is badly misrepresented in “The Conflict”), that a life combining both nurturing and providing for family is not only the most satisfying, but also the most traditionally natural for mothers. Hrdy’s research teaches that the split, or conflict, between a woman’s nurturing maternal role and her out-in-the-world, family-­provider role is a false one that flies in the face of the mothering practices of our primate ancestors, and that has been greatly aggravated by the work patterns of the modern industrialized world.

Having ploughed through the 540 pages of Hrdy’s book I’m not so sure that Badinter does mis-represent her argument. Warner’s account might be what Hrdy gestures at throughout but nowhere does she put it as baldly as this, partly, I suspect, because it would not be ‘good science’ to be so overtly political. What she does say is that field research shows that animal and human mothers continually make ‘trade-offs between quantity and quality, managing reproductive effort in line with their own life stage, condition and current circumstances’ (p 350). The care of allomothers (‘other than mothers’, including the father) is particularly critical to reproductive success. Mothering in nature, then is diverse, highly dependent on circumstance and support, and subject to threat from male attempts to control female fertility. Badinter is concerned less with Hrdy’s depiction of biological diversity, than with the political ideology to which it is in service (whether consciously or not). Given its breadth, I think Hrdy’s book supports both Badinter’s and Warner’s account of it.

I found much that was of interest in this book - e.g. its accounts of infanticide in different primate and human societies (pp 288-318) and the reasons why it is sometimes considered to be in both a mother’s and a community’s best interests (this was particularly interesting in light of debates about late-stage abortion) - and I think her point is well made that feminist critiques of sociobiology often critique the field as it was not as it is (p 535). Her own research and that of others shows that in nature, mothers of many species are not ‘all-sacrificing’ and passive, but ‘multi-faceted ... flexible actors whose responses were contingent on circumstances’, who sought varied ‘maternal alternatives to caring for their own infants’ (p 535). Here the science finds a ready audience in feminists and, you would think, anyone with half a brain. 

Despite this, parts of this book really challenged me, much like that initial picture. At first, I checked myself: as a non-scientist, and indeed, a ‘cultural critic’ was I guilty of knee-jerk disciplinary bias? Perhaps. I will certainly concede that I don’t have the disciplinary knowledge to challenge the science of what Hrdy writes about. I do, however, have the ability to critique and challenge the cultural meanings that she makes from that science (i.e. the recordings made of the observable habits and practices of animal and human societies). There were two particular things that played on my mind as I read the book: a lack of an overt awareness of the wider cultural and political context of her work, and a lack of any overt self-reflexivity about it.

Taking my first point, Hrdy nowhere acknowledges the legacy of social Darwinism and scientific racism nor the reasons why feminists or other cultural critics might have distanced themselves from it. What is now discredited as ‘scientific racism’, for example, categorised humans in stages of modernity, likening those at the bottom to ‘less-evolved’ apes and using dubious scientific experiments to support their theories. To be clear, I’m not accusing Hrdy of doing this, but the lack of acknowledgement of this legacy while drawing on primate societies and contemporary hunter-gatherer societies to draw conclusions for her audience (primarily Western and middle class) is astonishing. 

In that context, consider this sentence from the end of the book: ‘Over the next twenty years, Pat Draper ... studied the transition of the !Kung from a nomadic Pleistocene lifestyle to settled living amongst other African villagers’ (p 520, my emphasis). What is extraordinary about this statement, is not that contemporary !Kung people have adapted the way they live to changes in their environment, but that their previous life is described as ‘Pleistocene.’ ‘Pleistocene’ is the name given to the geological epoch which lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago. Its use as an adjective to describe a contemporary human society suggests traces of the legacy of scientific racism still remain. The woman who studies them, by contrast, is named and individualised. Furthermore, the transition to a lifestyle that might be considered ‘settled’ from a Western point of view, may well be profoundly ‘unsettling’ from the point of view of the !Kung. This is, however, difficult to gauge without hearing their testimony, of which is there is little in the book. 

My second point, closely related to the first, concerns the little overt acknowledgement of the power-relations between anthropological field workers and the ‘objects’ of their study. This was particularly disturbing to me when she cited, without any context, examples from work on the Yanamomo people of the Amazon basin to support her argument. I say ‘on’ quite deliberately. A couple of years ago, I saw the excellent but disturbing documentary Secrets of the Tribe (2010) which explored the devastating effects a handful of anthropologists had had on the Yanamomi people. Some of these effects included sexual abuse and the (knowing) spread  of epidemic diseases. 

I can only conclude that, like me, this book is confused. I wondered about the other book - glimpsed in personal examples offered periodically throughout - that Hrdy didn’t write. The one that began with her own experience of being both a scientist and a mother, the trade-offs she had had to make. She mentions at one point that a respected male mentor challenged her decision to continue working once she had children on the grounds that research in their field had shown that this was not good for child development. Surely, this is the place to start a book intended for a general audience? It could then have moved back and forth between developments in scientific research, how it is given meaning culturally, historically, and politically, and what that might mean for the lives of real women. Perhaps Hrdy’s belief in ‘dispassionate analysis’ (p 349) does not sit so well with the cultural idea that the personal is political. 

Did Hrdy’s book help explain my profoundly un-scientific reaction to the nursing dog and cat? Not really. Writing this review, however, and trying to find the words to describe my disquiet has. In trying to figure out what bugged me, I’ve come to this conclusion: I may be an animal, but I refuse to be animalised - whether positively or negatively - if it in any way means being defined as less than human, as an object who is acted upon rather than a subject who acts. 

another brick in the wall?

This week we went to an early Christmas party, with  lots of other children and parents. A good time was had by all, and Santa even put in a pre-Christmas visit (question from a child to Santa: ‘why are you giving us presents now - aren’t you meant to come on Christmas Eve?’). But, after the party food had been devoured and the wine-glasses drained, a couple of (admittedly minor) instances stuck in my mind. The first involved the distribution of coloured bottles of soapy bubble mixture, and the second involved taking turns in the vegetable garden. 

In the first instance, the hostess of the party had thoughtfully laid in a store of bottles of bubble mixture with which the children - ranging in ages from 15 months to seven years - could amuse themselves. The mixture in each bottle was the same, the only difference was the colour of the plastic bottle that contained it, which were green, blue, red, purple and pink. Most of the parents had given their children the first bottle that came to hand out of the bag, although one had made a conscious effort to find a pink bottle for her ‘pink-obsessed’ daughter. We had given our girl a pink bottle because it was the nearest to hand, but shortly rescued it off her when it became apparent her still-developing fine motor skills meant that she couldn’t easily blow a bubble while simultaneously holding it. As she was content to chase the bubbles blown by others, we put the bottle back on the table for an older, more co-ordinated, child to enjoy. 

Shortly afterwards, such a child - a boy - appeared at the table looking for some bubble mixture of his very own. Unaware that there was a bag containing other bottles, we pointed out the pink bottle on the table and said he could have that one. Just as he reached out for it, one of the mothers (not his) actively prevented him from taking it, loudly asking where the bag was so that she could give the boy another bottle that wasn’t pink. At which point, a few other people, who had been milling around but until then hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice of the colour of the bottles, chimed in with jokey remarks such as ‘what were you thinking?’ (aimed at the boy) and ‘we can’t be having that’. They then took it upon themselves to help the woman find the boy a suitably masculine blue bottle of bubbles. It all happened in a low-key and light-hearted way, but nonetheless this minor incident can be considered an example of the shaming and policing of gender. 

The boy was three.

Afterwards, this incident got me thinking about other (also minor) instances that I’ve witnessed in the past weeks and months that also amount to gender policing. A boy who pushed my girl out of the way and was not reprimanded by his parent, who had clearly seen what happened. A girl being told to stand back from the slide at the playground, when a boy pushed in, to keep her ‘out of harm’s way.’ A boy being told not to cry, when he fell over and started wailing, clearly in some distress. A girl being praised for being cute. A boy being congratulated for ‘taking charge’. A girl admonished for being ‘bossy’. 

All of these instances are small. But small instances multiply. They may not amount to much in themselves, but constant repetition of such minor instances solidifies how children understand acceptable and unacceptable gender behaviour in a given place and time. That goes for both the children that such opprobrium or approval is directed at, and those who are merely bystanders. Pink-bubblegate wasn’t directed at my girl, for example, but being in the room when it occurred, she surely registered that something unusual was going on.

As my baby gets older, I am increasingly sensitised to the small moments that amount to bricks in the wall of stereotypically gendered behaviour. I acknowledge that we can’t escape gendered cultural scripts, and I am conscious that I don’t want to denigrate conventionally feminine things - hence giving her a pink bottle of bubbles in the first place, because pink is a colour just like any other with no intrinsic gender value (or so I keep telling myself through gritted teeth). This becomes even more important if we accept the findings of neuroscientists that nurture - i.e. what we learn - effectively becomes nature - i.e. what we are.  Neuroscientist Lise Eliot comments:

Think about language. Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds and grammar and intonation of any language, but then the brain wires itself up to only perceive and produce a specific language. After puberty, it's possible to learn another language, but it's far more difficult. I think of gender differences similarly: the ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. That contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired. (Eliot quoted in the Guardian)

To return to the scene of the family Christmas party and the second instance I mentioned. This one was also low-key and involved the children taking turns to run up and down a narrow piece of sacking in the middle of the vege garden (the strangest things seem to float their boats, huh?) After being told not to step in the actual vege patch, which contained newly-planted lettuces that would not benefit from the nurture of enthusiastic toddlers, the children - a boy and our girl - ran up to the opposite ends of the sacking and then started running towards each other, like cliched lovers in a romantic comedy ... or jumbo jets on a collision course. At some point, both children would meet in the middle with no room to pass. Would one of them yield or would mediation be required? 

I have to confess that my first impulse was to pull our girl out of the way and let the boy pass. A split-second later, my feminist consciousness kicked in and I checked myself. After all, I reasoned, why should it automatically be the girl who gives way? Wouldn’t that just be a brick in the wall of the idea that girls (and women) should defer to boys (and men)? Not to mention that it might also communicate to the boy that his will takes precedence over a girl’s. Instead, I chose not to intervene to see what the children did when they met in the middle. 

What I saw provided a salutary lesson.

Toe to toe, the children looked at each other, looked down at their feet, looked around at the sacking and the garden. Who, if anyone, would prevail? After thoughtful consideration, and without any discernible words, they then turned on their sides and passed each other back to back. They both remained on the sacking with only perhaps a couple of toes venturing into the garden, and the little lettuces remained intact. I felt proud of both of them for their equitable - and apparently telepathic - approach to problem-solving. It meant neither of them lost face, both got want they wanted, and neither was ‘forced’ to learn a lesson about gendered behaviour from an interfering adult (i.e. me!)

It also made me realise that unless I am conscious about the meaning of my actions then, all in all, I have the potential to be just another brick in the wall.

motherhood, two years on

 It’s all over for another year. The wrapping paper has been torn apart, the birthday cake made, iced and eaten, the ‘happy birthdays’ sung.  Two, the milestone we have been looking forward to since our baby was about eighteen months old, has come and gone.

Last year, she watched us bemused as we undid her presents and held up strange objects to her with wide eyes and big smiles. This year, she unceremoniously ripped them open herself, eager to find what was inside. Last year, she cautiously picked up her new toys, waved them round a bit, and then went and found something much more interesting to do, like playing with the pegs. This year, she got the toys out of the box, with a little help, and spent most of the morning playing with them.

So much has changed in a year.

Last year, she was on her feet, but still holding on to the furniture for balance as she inched her way round the room. This year, she jumped round the room in excitement, hands waving in the air like she just didn’t care. Last year, she was communicating with points and expressive grunts. This year, she tells us the very hungry caterpillar ate four strawberries, the teletubbies have dirty knees, and ‘mummy and daddy come on!’. Last year, she was yet to wean and still nursed three times a day. This year, she gobbles down pasta and swigs cows’ milk with all the gusto of a thirsty pirate.

So much has changed in a year.

Last year, I was was still on parental leave, alternating between wonder and boredom, feeling the days yawn before me with little I absolutely had to do. This year, I am back at work three days a week and am increasingly feeling like I don’t have enough time in the day, week and month to do all the things I need to do. Last year, I filled up some of those long hours with creative pursuits, like learning the guitar, writing stories, blogging, making elaborate birthday and Christmas decorations. This year, my most creative output is arranging tomatoes on top of the mac ‘n’ cheese, and I fit in the other things when I can. Last year, I began to feel weighed down by societal expectations of motherhood. This year, I have read, thought and written enough to realise how invisible the work of mothering can be, and how little value is placed on it.

So much has changed in a year.

These are just some of the changes the year from one to two in my baby’s life has brought us. I have to confess that I have enjoyed this year more than the first. While I cherished the first year I spent looking after my baby, it was too marked by physical pain and weakness, the total dependence of a helpless baby, the boredom and isolation of long days, the social invisibility made bearable by fragile alliances with other new mothers, and the financial dependence to be simply enjoyed. This year, as I said to a work colleague before I could stop myself on the second day back, ‘I feel like I’ve got my life back.’ 

Since I returned to work, I’ve been struck by the number of women who’ve confided a similar feeling to me, often prefaced by the confession ‘I wasn’t a natural mother.’  It’s as if we think we should feel permanently guilty for not only wanting the best for our children, but the best for ourselves too. By comparison, workplace performance appraisals seem a walk in the park.

In all honesty, I think both my baby and I have benefitted from having some time apart: she loves and trusts another adult to care for her and has made fast friends with the other children with whom she spends the day. She thrives in their company, has learnt all manner of new skills, and has few outward signs of distress at being separated from me (hmmm, maybe I should be worried about that?!) I appreciate the days I have her to myself more, and have picked up numerous ideas for activities and bits of advice from her carer. For me, I think returning to work has made me a better mother, and I hope, when she looks back, my baby thinks so too. I know she already enjoys looking through her daybook at the photos, paintings and collages she has done and telling me all about them.

I also acknowledge that what I feel is working for us at the moment, may not necessarily be the right things for another family in different circumstances. If I have learnt nothing else in the last two years, it is that it’s best to feel my way by trusting my instincts. These instincts are not so much innate, as things learnt so well in interactions between me and my baby that they become second nature. 

And my baby?

She’s funny and bright, easygoing yet increasingly independent. She likes Thomas and Laa-laa, books, bikes and balls, macaroni and mess. She runs, jumps and climbs, sings, drums, and paints. Her hair is finally starting to grow in, in a mess of fine unruly curls. She has nearly collected a full set of teeth. She is as flexible as an experienced yogi, casually squatting and stretching with an ease we have long since lost. She likes to tip flour and dance, but not at the same time, mostly. She plays pretend birthday parties and offers us cake. She soaks up new experiences like a sponge, neurons firing, synapses connecting, her brain function increasing, it seems, by the day. She's excited each day about all the things there are for her to learn and do, yet she still needs a sleep in the middle of it all to make it through.

So much has changed this year.

I wonder what the next year will bring?

review: The Price of Motherhood

Much like buses, in this blog you could be waiting around for book reviews with none looming on the horizon (as in September) and then several come along all at one (as in October - November). Perhaps this says something about the time I have to devote to reading relatively lengthy books on feminism and motherhood, perhaps on how alert my brain is after a day’s paid and unpaid work. As my current reading material - Sarah Hrdy’s Mother Nature - is literally verging on encyclopaedic this might be the last review for a wee while. 

Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (2001) is one of the few books I have read - on any subject - that pretty much lives up to the hype on the cover: ‘a landmark book,’ ‘powerful and important’, and ‘a scathing indictment of policies that cheat mothers’. Naomi Wolf could do worse than have a squizz at this to get some tips on powerful ways to combine the personal and political (although, to be fair, I guess she probably has).  Unlike Kunin’s book, which I reviewed last week, Crittenden's book has a resonance beyond the borders of the United States. In the US, the institutional biases towards mothers may be writ large (in paid employment, in divorce, in single parenting, in tax rules), but they are present to some degree in other so-called developed countries as well. Not least in the ways at which the devaluing  - or, more accurately, the non-valuing - of a mother’s unpaid work institutionalises gender inequity and socio-economic disadvantage.

Crittenden’s book, reissued last year, is based on five years of research in economics, history, child development, family law, public policy, demography, anthropology, evolutionary psychology and on field interviews with a range of parents. It is also based on her own experiences of the acute disempowerment she felt on having children. She writes:

This is also a work of the heart, growing out of my own experiences as a professional woman and a mother. As a beneficiary of the women’s movement, for years I lived the unencumbered life of a journalist; one of the boys in a gender-neutral environment that represented enormous progress for women ... [A] surprise came when I realised [after having a baby] how little my former world seemed to understand, or care, about the complex reality I was discovering. The dominant culture  of which I had been a part considered child-rearing unskilled labor, if it considered child-rearing at all. And no-one was stating the obvious: if human abilities are the ultimate fount of economic progress, as many economists now agree, and if those abilities are nurtured (or stunted) in the early years, then mothers and other care-givers of the young are the most important producers in the economy. They do, literally, have the most important job in the world. (pp 10-11)

While I wonder just how ‘gender-neutral’ her previous work environment really was - it’s not like women without children don’t face any barriers in their careers - Crittenden’s outrage struck a chord. I read on, intrigued. 

First of all, Crittenden traces the disappearance of women’s ‘work’ during the nineteenth century, as workplaces began to be increasingly located outside the home. So far, so obvious. What Crittenden also traces is attitudinal shifts and the specific locatable moments at which these seismic changes occurred. Around the middle of the nineteenth-century, for example, the developing national census began to classify the occupations of individuals within households rather than treating households as a single economic unit. As part of this shift, household labour (‘housekeeping’) was re-classified as ‘unproductive’ and separate from ‘productive labour’. Mothers ‘keeping house’ for their own families (unproductive) were distinguished from women keeping house for wages (productive).  This shift in the way a mother’s work was conceptualised meant that by the turn of the twentieth century, women and children were both considered as dependents or, more specifically, as economic liabilities rather than assets. Despite some differences, this trend manifested across the United States, in Britain and in Australia (and, I would guess, a number of other countries too). 

And, in the 1920s, the gendered definitions of productivity became enshrined in international economic instruments, specifically in the measure that became known as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Significantly, GDP only measured goods and services that were sold; by excluding ‘non-productive’ work from the national wealth ‘almost all the activities of married women were omitted from the scorecard of capitalism.’ (p 65). Crittenden does acknowledge that this has more recently begun to change, not least in terms of contemporary environmental problems (e.g. how do you calculate the value of clean water?), the insights of feminist economics, and a deeper understanding of what is called - a little chillingly, I think - human capital.   

Crittenden cites with approval Marilyn Waring’s call to unpaid caregivers to tell census-takers that they are unpaid workers rather than ‘unemployed’; she traces how a campaign to do just that in Canada in the 1990s led to changes in the way unpaid labour in the home was counted in the census. During this campaign, Carol Lees, its principal organiser, encountered resistance from women’s groups who apparently did not agree with her child-care policy (which, according to her, is ‘to value it wherever it occurs, in or out of the home’ p 83). By the late 1990s, a number of countries had begun to collect data on unpaid labour. These shifts started to reveal the ‘free ride’ most societies were getting on the back of this unpaid work: ‘the entire society benefits from well-reared children, without sharing more than a fraction of the costs of producing them. And that free ride on female labor is enforced by every major institution, starting with the workplace’ (p 86). In neo-liberal economies particularly, children are thus seen as an individual ‘choice’ rather than a social good (much less a community responsibility). This rationale drives such practices as expensive child care of variable quality, limited financial benefits for families, a demonise-the-parents approach to all manner of anti-social behaviours, and humiliating reckonings of what a wife is worth in divorce settlements (including child support payments). Cue a thousand comedy routines concerning blood-sucking former spouses...

She closes her analysis by setting out a programme for business, government, and the community, the ‘free riders’ on mothers’ unpaid labour who reap the benefits from well-nurtured children while contributing little to the cost.

Throughout the book, Crittenden doesn’t shy away from the fact that some early feminists bought into the productive / unproductive distinction and played a role in the perpetuation of inequity: she documents a 1909 debate between Charlotte Perkins Gilman (who described the vast majority of women as ‘unproductive parasites’) and Anna Howard Shaw (who argued that a mother’s role in the home should be compensated), as marking a crucial turning point in the US feminist agenda. Gilman, she argues, saw the shift in women’s status as requiring the overthrow of the patriarchal family as an economic unit to emancipate women, revealing some degree of contempt for the way in which a number of her contemporaries actually spent their time. 

Crittenden concludes: 

As that evening in New York illustrated, at the turn of the twentieth century, the women’s movement contained two contradictory strands: one that denigrated women’s role within the family, and one that demanded recognition and remuneration for it .... For the rest of the twentieth century, the women’s movement followed the first path, and it led to innumerable great victories. But in choosing that  path, many women’s advocates accepted the continued devaluation of motherhood, thereby guaranteeing that feminism would not resonate with millions of wives and mothers. (p 63)

I’m usually a little suspicious of sweeping statements, but it’s nonetheless hard to escape Crittenden’s conclusion. It bristles behind every cry of outrage from previously career-minded new mothers (‘why didn’t anyone tell me?’), some of which are either overtly or covertly contained in the recent outpourings of ‘mummy-literature’: from the sardonic critiques of coffee-groups, to the more personal memoir, to the political polemic, to the historical analysis of motherhood as institution, to the exposition of ‘natural’ motherhood, to the mummy blog. It’s hard not to read it into the statistic of approximately 30 per cent of well-educated middle class women in ‘developed’ countries who are apparently choosing the ‘nuclear option’ of not having children. It’s hard not to read it into the so-called mummy wars between ‘stay-at-home’ and working mothers. It’s hard not to read it in the failure of most governments to provide adequate support for families particularly in early childhood, and in businesses who bemoan family-friendly policies.  It’s hard not to read it in the overwhelming evidence - which Crittenden assembles in subsequent chapters - that those who look after children are not only poorly paid but lack status, have limited political clout, and pay plenty for their ‘labours of love’. 

Isn’t it time that governments, businesses, and communities started sharing more of the costs of raising a child, instead of just reaping the benefits?

review: The New Feminist Agenda

While I was reading Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict (reviewed previously), I cast around looking for reviews to see how other people had responded to the book. In doing so, I happened upon this review in the New York Times by Judith Warner (author of Perfect Madness, a journalistic skewering of the ideology of the perfect mother as practised among middle and upper-middle class white women in the USA). Warner actually reviewed two books: Badinter’s, with which she had some issues while simultaneously being seduced by the elegant writing, and former Vermont governor and US ambassador Madeleine M. Kunin’s 2012 book The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family. While Warner compared Kunin’s dry plain-speaking style unfavourably with Badinter’s, she much preferred Kunin’s ‘concrete, realistic’ politics, writing: 

Kunin’s is not a book of literary value, like Badinter’s. The writing is unremarkable, and there are no big, interesting philosophical ideas. Yet whereas Badinter’s argument is beautiful and essentially wrong, Kunin — Pollyanna-ish faith in the family-friendly nature of female politicians aside — is almost unimpeachably right, as she diagnoses what we in America need, why we’ve never gotten it, and how we may have some hope of achieving change in the future.

I too had some issues with Badinter’s book, although not quite the same ones as Warner, and thought it might be interesting to likewise read Kunin’s book in order to gain some insight into ‘concrete, realistic’ solutions.  Unlike Warner, however, I was less enamoured of Kunin’s book. I concede, however, that this may well be because I am not from the United States. I don’t mean that in an obnoxiously knee-jerk anti-American way. I mean rather that I found this book, while interesting, of limited use to those outside the US.  Instead, it made me very glad that I lived in a country that does not do the following:

• have no paid parental leave whatsoever (the only OECD country which does not)
• have slim to no paid sick leave for anybody, let alone parents of small children
• fail to protect unpaid parental leave for more than three months (after three months, parents seem to be at the mercy of their employers)
• fail to provide free healthcare for small children
• fail to provide new parents with professional support in the first weeks after having children 
• consider a forty-hour working week to be ‘part-time’
• have no right to request flexible working legislation
• tax spouses (usually mothers) at a marginal tax rate meaning proportionally more tax is taken from them, thus making it even more unaffordable for women with children to work
• does not provide proper regulation of early childhood education leaving some of it dangerously inadequate, and ensures that this sector remains one of the most poorly remunerated in the country (unless you are privileged to work for the Department of Defense)

And the list continues (and I will concede that there are New Zealand politicians now in power who seem hell-bent on eroding some of the protections we currently do enjoy, particularly in respect of single parents on benefits). Quite properly, Kunin is outraged at this laundry list of societal failings and her pragmatic aim is to set out a programme for women to take up the call and demand change.  She even begins her book describing her anger:

in my seventies I’m still dissatisfied with the status quo and harbour a passion for change. Old age allows me the luxury of being impatient - there isn’t much time left - and it permits me to say what I think, to be demanding, and, best of all, to imagine a different world where there is true gender equality in the workplace, the home and the political arena. (p 1)

Kunin then details a list of her expectations, developed through her involvement in second-wave feminism, that she sees as remaining unfulfilled. At the top of this list is the elusive goal of balancing career and family. Indeed, she was motivated to write this book by concluding that ‘many women who have careers that we could never imagined for ourselves are still flummoxed by the most age-old problem: how to have a job and take care of the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled.’ (p 2)

She then proceeds to systematically deliver the evidence of maternal disempowerment in the US, both in the workplace and on the home-front. She looks to international models (France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Canada, the UK, and Australia) not simply to find the US lacking but to compare and contrast how other countries’ social policies would translate in the US environment (with difficulty, apparently). Her political acumen is to the fore here and the programme she develops from this analysis is nothing if not pragmatic: don’t go for ‘paid parental leave’ (who will support the idea of women being ‘paid to do nothing’ - aarrgh!) but ‘family leave insurance’ (a tactic which was apparently successful in New Jersey); appeal to business’s self-interest rather than their moral duties (here she looks at examples of companies who have implemented family policies and how it has benefitted rather than disadvantaged their businesses) and building bipartisan coalitions across different interest groups (people with disabilities, the elderly and men) in order to re-define what the rhetoric of family values means in practice.

She is obviously way more cognisant of the terrain of US politics than I will ever be, and her proposed programme sounds sensible. And yet even Kunin recognises that it may be too unachievable: “Could we hold a march for family­/work policies in Washington? Would anybody come? Or would they be too tired, too busy, too scared of losing their jobs to attend?” Warner thinks what’s needed is a new glamourous multi-tasking Gloria Steinem as a figurehead to inspire and rally everyone. I’m not so sure.

My issue with Kunin’s programme is that it still deeply enmeshed in specific ideas about what constitutes ‘real work‘ and looks primarily to self-interest (particularly in the business world) to provide the answer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for paid parental leave, flexible working and so on, and I think business has a key role in this - but not to the exclusion of a strong social safety-net provided by a functional welfare state. And I’m frankly disappointed that her pragmatic suggestions appear to perpetuate the myth that stay-at-home parents don’t work (which is why looking solely to business will only ever provide part of the solution).  

As unpaid - or low-paid - carers of children, the chronically ill and the elderly, stay-at-home parents (usually mothers) work too, and in doing so contribute immeasurably to the economy. ‘Immeasurably’, that is, in the sense that it isn’t systematically measured - there are many examples of calculating the costs of a mother’s unpaid work: here in Canada and here by the International Labour Organisation. Where is the part of Kunin’s programme that calls for the substantive recognition and valuing of this work?  Sure, she gestures at in places - for example in the chapter, ‘New Family Portraits’ which looks at shared parenting, stay at home dads, and how to explain ‘resumé gaps’ - but when she espouses calling for ‘family leave insurance’ because people will be turned off by ‘paid parental leave’ (because who wants to pay someone for ‘not working’ - aargh!), it may be pragmatic and politically palatable but it’s still reinforcing the idea that the unpaid work of caring is not productive work at all. 

I recently had some insight into this distinction. Having just bought our first house, my husband and I decided it would be prudent to look into life and income protection insurance. Our insurance advisor - a working mother herself - recommended insuring my husband’s income only (even though I too am working). While she was aware that this might come across as offensive to me, nonetheless the advice was couched in terms of the problems we could face if my husband couldn’t work for whatever reason. I’m not disputing that: it would totally suck if we didn’t have access to his income. But later on it got me thinking - well what if something happened to me and we not only lost my income, but my ability to care for our child for no pay whatsoever? If we had to pay someone to care for her without my income to cover it, or for my husband to reduce his hours so he could do it, then we would also face problems (which would, admittedly, be ameliorated to some extent by the safety-net of the welfare state - as would his unemployment or disability). But that unpaid care is apparently not worth insuring because it has no monetary value. 

This is patently nonsense. In a family with dependent children - and overwhelmingly so in the US, I would guess, with the thin social safety net provided - the unpaid work of the primary care-giver enables the other partner to be economically ‘productive’. And this is even more the case for single-parent families: participating in the paid economy is somehow - unbelievably - valued more highly than being able to provide parental care in the home. The limits of Kunin’s analysis in this respect are problematic, yet how to recognise the value of unpaid or low-paid care-work is canvassed at length in earlier work by Ann Crittenden in The Price of Motherhood (2001) and New Zealand’s own Marilyn Waring in If Women Counted (1988). 

While there is much of interest and value in Kunin’s book, perhaps this blind-spot shows up the limits of a politically pragmatic approach, rather than one that takes fundamental issue with the ways in which a national culture operates, and, on that basis, demands laws, policies, practices and institutions to show it values families in fact, not just in rhetoric. After all, if your starting point is compromise, then surely you only end up with small wins at best.

terrible twos?

My baby is nearly two. ‘Ah, the terrible twos!’ people say knowingly, leaving me wondering what we might be in for. It’s true that, as my baby is getting older and becoming increasingly independent, we have had some moments where our desires didn’t exactly coincide (translation: she has a big meltdown if we want her to have a bath and she is busy doing something else). But - and here I should be trying to find as much wood to touch as possible - so far these meltdowns have been few and short. (I suspect this might be the moment when parents with older children are starting to think ‘mmhmmmm...just wait’). 

Thinking that it might be a good idea to get prepared for what the next few years might hold, I talked to our local Plunket nurse about managing behaviour (translation: what should I do if my baby turns into a wailing banshee in the middle of the supermarket?)  Before offering some useful tips, she said that part of early childhood development is about learning how to control strong emotions in a healthy way. She also said that so-called tantrums are a form of communication: sometimes toddlers act out because they are frustrated at not being able to express what they want in a way their parents can understand (and parents can get frustrated at not being able to understand too). If a child can speak well from an early age, they are less likely to have meltdowns because they can’t be understood. On the other hand, they can have meltdowns when their wants are understood and not supplied (for example, when their winning argument about not wanting to have a bath is ignored)

Whether it is failure to be heard and understood or failure to have one’s desires fulfilled, ‘tantrums’ (starting to really not like that word) are an expression of frustration, of being thwarted, and of being ignored. In other words, the kids are angry.

As an emotion, anger seems to have a bad rap. Anger is conventionally equated with overweening aggression and violence: at best, it should be ‘managed’, at worst ‘suppressed’. Modern psychologists, however, apparently view anger as a primary, natural, and mature emotion experienced by virtually all humans at times, and as something that has functional value for survival. Anger is thought to mobilize psychological resources for corrective action. It is uncontrolled anger that is the problem. 

British psychotherapist Sue Parker Hall, for example, argues that anger originates at age 18 months to 3 years (those ‘terrible twos’) to provide the motivation and energy for a child who is beginning to separate from their carers and assert their differences: it therefore emerges at the same time as thinking is developing.

As with much else, anger is also gendered: girls and women more commonly display passive angry behaviours such as sulking (another of my pet hate words), vindictive gossiping, defeatism and self-blame, while boys and men more commonly display aggressive behaviours, such as destructiveness and bullying (I am generalising here, of course: different people can display different combinations of passive and aggressive behaviours).  

Why might girls and women engage in more passive angry behaviours? Bit of a no-brainer this, really: because, more broadly, girls and women are not encouraged to be assertive and direct in the expression of their feelings. Instead of openly addressing people’s hurtful behaviour with them, girls and women are taught to shun them and b*tch (no coincidence that this is a pejorative word for women) behind their back. Instead of raising their voice and telling people what to do, girls and women are meant to keep quiet and get on with it, leading to the development of resentment (and rough shaking of kitchen implements). Cue an unsuspecting man saying ‘what’s wrong?’, to which a woman classically replies ‘nothing’ (in a way that indicates that everything is wrong and she’s really angry about it). He will shrug his shoulders, go back to what he’s doing, causing yet more anger .... and a million comedy routines are born.

This is by no means to say that women should adopt more active forms of anger if this means adopting aggressive, threatening, intimidating and violent behaviour. Rather, the ideal for both genders is to speak up, say what’s bugging them, and work through it constructively. It’s the speaking up about what’s bothering you that can be the hardest thing to do, especially when it seems trivial. Both men and women, boys and girls - and I include myself in this - are works in progress when it comes to managing anger successfully.

Here Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has in the last fortnight shown the way in terms of directly expressing her anger with the person concerned. Whatever her political record (and, as with any male politician, there is plenty with which to take issue), Gillard demonstrated her anger by standing up, naming the misogyny and sexism in public life, and shaming the behaviour of those responsible. That has to be a positive step in tackling sexism in public life, and it’s no wonder it struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of women worldwide.

But what about social anger? Who could deny that anger is a force for social change, both positive and negative? As I mentioned in a previous post, if ‘first wave’ feminists weren’t angry about their lack of economic or political clout and sought to do something about it, then a whole lot of women would be a lot worse off. This is true in any number of movements.

Women, particularly mothers, are still angry. In the 1990s, a Women’s Anger Study found that there were three common roots to women's anger: powerlessness, injustice and the irresponsibility of other people. Another study found that parenthood exacerbated anger in women: ‘women have higher levels of anger than men, ... each additional child in the household increases anger, and ... children increase anger more for mothers than for fathers.’

The researchers found that this ‘anger gap’ was because:

Parenthood introduces two types of objective stressors into an individual's life: economic strains and the strains associated with child care. Women are exposed to both types of strain more than men. Economic hardship, child-care responsibilities in the household, and difficulties arranging and paying for child care all significantly increase anger, and explain the effects of gender and parenthood on anger. In support of a gender inequality perspective, we find that mothers have the highest levels of anger because of economic inequality and the inequitable distribution of parental responsibilities. Mothers also are more likely to express their anger than others.

When it comes to feminism, women and anger have an uneasy relationship. Anger has ignited many a social movement, but can also be the stick used to beat those who would strive for change. Former US ambassador and Vermont governor Madeleine M. Kunin writes about anger in her 2012 book The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work, and Family. In it, she quotes from an interview she conducted with Anita Hill. Hill says:

‘We have to be allowed to be angry.’ // Women are hesitant to be angry because ‘they don’t want to be labelled femi-Nazis,’ she says. ‘Feminism has been caricatured to [such] a degree that it takes anger as a political tool away from them.’ (p 254)

Kunin agrees, but cautions, ‘if anger is too severe it may result in despair, the belief that nothing we can do will change anything. Or extreme anger may result in violence  - the belief that the only way to change anything is tear the existing system down and start from scratch.’ While Kunin thinks that there is a place for this kind of anger - e.g. in protests against totalitarian regimes - she believes that ‘change best occurs when we can express controlled targeted anger focussed on a new vision of society’.

Change can also occur by recognising that anger, particularly in women, is a healthy response to injustice, irresponsibility and powerlessness. If women learn to both express and channel their anger to address those things then doesn’t that also help role-model to their children - particularly their girls - how to best articulate their anger rather than suppress it?  

Speaking for myself, one of the things that drove me to start this blog was anger. I might not have put it that way when I started out, rather viewing it as a creative and intellectual outlet, and something to alleviate the boredom of being stuck at home with a baby all day. But it was also a means of venting some frustration: both with the pinkarama that seems to pass for girlhood these days, and with the lack of recognition and respect for the work involved in stay-at-home-parenting.

Similarly, the frustrations of toddlers are also about powerlessness and injustice (or at least perceived injustice: ‘You want me to have bath? But I want to keep riding my bike! That’s so unfair!’). It might not be quite in the same league as movements for social change - and I don’t wish to trivialise those by the comparison - but there are power relations within a family to which toddlers are on some level responding.   

Bearing that in mind, I’m going to try my best to empathise more next time a battle of wills is brewing at bath-time ...