'it was your choice to have a child'

“You'd think there was no right more sacred than to be financially underwritten by the community when you choose to have children too young, alone, and without the means to support them” (Columnist Rosemary McLeod writing in The Press)

Choose to? Leaving aside the mean-spirited politics, what kind of ‘choice’ is that?

Choice is a central obsession of late capitalist culture. As long as individuals have plenty of choice then everything is supposed to be all right: we can choose what job to work at, and choose when we have children, how many we might have, and how we might have them.

And, if we make the right choices, our kids will turn out all right ... right?  After all, we can choose to breastfeed them ... if we have the support and the ability to do so; we can choose to stay at home with them ... if we have enough money and the inclination; we can choose to feed them organic hand-reared meat or home-grown vegetables lovingly braised in a slow-cooker ... if we have enough money, our own homes, the time, and the desire to spend all day preparing food; and, eventually, we can choose to send them to private school ... if we have enough money and the right connections.  

The language of choice is ideological. It assumes an individual who has plenty of resources - financial, cultural and institutional - who can make the most of the choices on offer. If someone can’t - or won’t - make the correct socially-approved ‘choices’, they’re bound to be on the receiving end of, at least, disapproval (‘why is your son wearing pink?’) or, at worst, punishment (benefit cuts, children removed). The language of individual choice, then, absolves the community and the state from any stake in those choices: the individual makes the choice, and the individual takes the consequences. It’s a bare step up from ‘you’ve made your bed, you can lie in it.’ There’s precious little soul-searching about how we might have chosen to ignore families in our midst who really struggle with apparent choices that are not much of a choice at all. It’s like we made the bed, but refuse to recognise it as a device for sleeping, much less lying in.

There is a historical dimension to the ascendancy of ‘choice’ in childrearing. Journalist Sue Kedgley found there was a deliberate move away from State support of families to individual choice as part of the general policy shift in the 1980s and 1990s towards free market capitalism. She comments that the New Zealand Treasury no longer saw childbearing and childrearing as ‘critically important activities for the future of the state ... Instead Treasury ... redefined them as activities that are motivated by ‘personal choice’ or ‘irrational desire’ (Mum’s the Word, p 335) This re-definition meant that laws, policies and practices were similarly re-defined: the responsibilities of the State and community to parents and families shifted from collective investment in society’s future to enabling individual choice. Among other things, this has meant the removal of the family benefit, the glacial roll-out of paid parental leave, and, more recently, cuts to early childhood education.

Perhaps one of the most loaded ‘choices’ a mother can make is whether or not to stay at home to look after her children or go out to work to support her children.  But this ‘choice’ is not simply about the best way to mother. In her analysis of US working mothers who quit their jobs to return to the home, Pamela Stone found that the women she interviewed quit as a last resort, and for reasons of work, not family. She calls their decision "a kind of silent strike" and describes their failed efforts to re-invent the workplace in their image: "These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos." Their use of the language of choice "often had the effect of obscuring or rendering invisible to them the constraints they faced”. In “The Opposite of Choice”, Judith Stadtman Tucker agrees, observing that “the discourse of choice masks the persistence and variables of women's inequality, and the scarcity of adequate options”. 

In the absence of real choices, an increasing percentage of well-educated middle-class women - the group with most apparent choice - are choosing what Elisabeth Badinter has described as a ‘nuclear option’. They are not having children at all. For those that do have children, the language of choice has a policing function. As Aminatta Forna observes, “voices of dissent and dissatisfaction are increasingly met with dismissal and a response which has a peculiarly modern twist: that it was their own choice to have a child” (The Mother of All Myths, p 260). So what if you’re finding it hard to make ends meet, you’re about to go postal from isolation, and you’re sick of people telling you that you have to breastfeed: it was your choice to have a child. Or in other words, ‘you’ve made your bed, you can lie in it.’

In order to have real, meaningful choices an individual or couple can’t parent in a vacuum. Community and State support in the form of, among other things, high-quality affordable childcare, paid parental leave (ideally able to be shared), adequate living benefits for solo parents with young children, and commitment to flexible working both in the public and private sectors would be a good start.

Along with a little less sermonising and a little more understanding about the ‘choices’ people have to make.

That would be pretty choice, eh?

'a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down'

‘In ev'ry job that must be done

There is an element of fun

you find the fun and snap!

The job's a game

And ev'ry task you undertake

Becomes a piece of cake

A lark! A spree!

It's very clear to me that ....’

In the last few weeks I have been negotiating my return to work. This has involved not only discussing how and when with my manager, but also, and more importantly, finding acceptable and affordable childcare. Unluckily for me, no Mary Poppins floated magically from the sky to provide her services free of charge. No Supernanny with TV crew in tow came knocking at the door. And, fortunately, no too-good-to-be-true nanny-with-an-agenda Peyton Flanders wants to offer her hands for my cradle.

Instead, propelled by dark mutterings about daycare lists as long as your arm and the dearth of quality childcare places available, I started trekking around various centres and visiting a number of in-home educators to try and find the right balance between what I could afford and what felt comfortable. Aside from the practical considerations, of course, returning to work and choosing childcare (two sides of the same coin) is cathected with other more intangible concerns: guilt, uncertainty, sadness. Convincing yourself that you’re doing the right thing by returning to work and leaving your child in someone else’s care is at least as much about your emotions as your bank account.

Novelist Rachel Cusk describes her search in A Life’s Work:

The person I had in mind was to be found not in the Yellow Pages but amidst choirs of heavenly angels, or in the pages of a storybook. She was wise, competent, kind, loving. Her salary was modest and vocational; her hours were love’s own. She had no earthly existence but sort of materialised on my doorstep each morning, took the baby reassuringly from my arms, wiped away my tears and said things like You just go off and enjoy yourself, we’ll have a lovely time here, won’t we? She was the projection of my conflicted self; she resolved the fact that I never wanted to leave my daughter with the unfortunate truth that if I didn’t I would never be able to do anything else again. (p 147)

I guess I’m not the only one who wishes that the Mary Poppins solution was a real option.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I began my search for childcare while I was still pregnant. Fellow parents at work had warned me that daycare places filled up quickly in the central city. One woman who had visited a centre while she was eight months’ pregnant, and was not planning to return to work until the baby was one, was told she had left things to the last minute! Determined not to be similarly caught out, I too started doing the rounds, thinking how ridiculous this panic was: it meant long lists were kept artificially inflated by anxious parents-to-be who had no real idea what their childcare needs would be once their babies were born. I’m sure it suits daycare centres to be so in-demand.

I visited three centres before my baby was born. I walked into one, just down the road from me in a converted house, and nearly turned right round and walked back out again. My politeness gene kicked in, however, and I looked around the centre trying my best to swallow my feelings of dismay. I visited another, which was much better, but was slightly perturbed by the religious content. Nonetheless, I put our name down, thinking we could cope with that if necessary.

A third centre seemed to be The One. It seemed calm and spacious, well-lit and warm, with a lovely outdoor area and kindly staff. Feeling cheered, I enthuiastically asked where we could sign up. The centre manager was keen too, until I told her that my child would be 18 months before she would attend. ‘We only take children up to age two,’ she said. ‘It would be too disruptive to settle her in at 18 months and then send her someone else six months later.’ At the time, disappointed, I took this at face-value. Looking back on it, I find it hard to believe an 18-month old would find a third of their life-span to be too short a time in which to get settled. I also marvelled at the irony that I was effectively being prevented from my current top choice by my desire to stay at home longer than a year.

But, c’est la vie, it was not to be.

Feeling more and more exhausted by the late stages of pregnancy, I decided to put my search on hold until after the baby was born. I did, however, make the mistake of reading a little around what things to look for in choosing childcare. While I am otherwise a huge fan of books, in terms of raising children I think they have limited applicability (i.e. good for reference, but no substitute for instincts, experience and loving perserverance). And so it proved in this case.

On the one hand, some child-experts recommended day-care in well-lit, open-plan spacious rooms with high teacher-to-child ratios. This meant that children were in sight at all times, and presumably spoke to parents’ fears about the disturbing things that could happen to young children in daycare when no-one was looking. The subtext seemed to be the more adults around - preferably women, of course - the less chance your child would end up abused in some way. Sociability is emphasised rather than close attachments (which could, perhaps, be undesirable).

On the other hand, other childcare experts recommend the maintenanace of close, personal attachments for children, particularly under the age of two. Ideally, this would be a parent or other guardian (read: mother or grandmother), but, if you really have to go back to work (and do you, really?), a nanny or home educator is the best option. The subtext in this case is less about abuse - this has to be downplayed if you are to trust one person to look after your child - and more about child development. Brain and emotional development is emphasised rather than sociability.

I found both schools of thought played disturbingly on the already guilty feelings that I was having about childcare. At the same time, these subtexts made me angry. The spectre of institutionalised child abuse - which does happen, but is, mercifully, not common - encourages women (and it’s usually women) to either stay at home or stay concentrated in comparatively low-paid early childhood care. The spectre of possibly impeding your child’s development by placing them too soon into group daycare can work to make women rethink or postpone their return to work, lest they irretrievably damage their children. Assuming a basic level of parental care and attention, is it really so detrimental? After all, historians tell us that the breadwinner-homemaker family is a fairly recent invention and somehow homo sapiens has managed to not only survive but also prosper.

It was with some feeling of triumph then - and, to be honest, a little whisper of ‘yes, but how do I know they’re right? - that I read about recent research by feminist scholars on the effects of childcare on young children. They confirmed findings that very young children tend to have the best outcomes if they have a secure and loving relationship with a primary caregiver (note that this doesn't have to be the mother). However, they also found that there was very little difference between these children and children who had been in high-quality childcare from a young age.

There are key phrases here, such as, ‘high quality’ and ‘secure relationships’, that can still press buttons. What if you can’t afford ‘high quality?’ What if you can’t afford not to work? But the conclusions were much less emotive than those summarised above with their questionable subtexts. Importantly, they also placed these conclusions in the context of developing appropriate policies and flexible work-places that better supported the needs of all families with young children. In reviewing the available New Zealand literature in early 2011, the Children's Commissioner reached similar conclusions.

Once my baby was born, and after I had recovered enough to start looking again at childcare, I once more delved back into my quest. I visited several more daycare centres. With my actual child in tow, they all started to seem lacking in various ways: too dirty, too small, not enough outdoor space, not at all what I had envisaged. Some centres did not even return my phonecalls or emails of inquiry. Even though I still had several months to go before returning to work, I was starting to panic.

My husband and I discussed the possibility of us both working part-time and sharing childcare. This would’ve been my ideal, but in the more pragmatic world of the workplace, employers can be even less flexible with fathers than they can with mothers. So, in the short-term, this is not a realistic option for us.

We then decided to look into the option of in-home childcare. We found pretty soon that hiring a nanny would virtually eat up all my salary, and render working almost pointless. So, our next option was in-home childcare. A woman (and, yep, it’s usually women) looks after up to four children in her own home, with an emphasis on educative activities (or ‘play’, as you and I might like to call it). This seemed like a better option to us, and we went through a few agencies to meet different eductors. And, again, the quest was initially dispiriting. Few to no people available in our area, days that didn’t align with working-days and home environments that weren’t quite what I had in mind. I was starting to feel a bit like I had virtually no choice but to postpone my return to work a little longer, at least until my baby was two, and the childcare options became wider.

This feeling is apparently not an unusual one. In Opting Out? (2007), which explores the reasons why career women are apparently choosing to ‘opt out’ of the rat-race to become full-time mothers, sociologist Pamela Stone concludes that high-achieving women "face a double-bind which is created by the pressure to be both the ideal mother (based on the intensive mothering model) and the ideal worker…The result of this double bind is that their choices or options are indeed much more limited that they appear at first or than the women themselves appreciate."

I know I was starting to feel - from both work and the available childcare that I could afford - that my ‘choices’ were narrowing. The responsibility I don’t have a ‘choice’ about is my child’s wellbeing. If it came down to choosing between leaving her somewhere that I wasn’t really happy with, and returning to work, my ‘choice’ would be made for me.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. We have, at last, found a childcare arrangement with which we are happy. I haven’t yet started back at work, so I can’t speak from the position of actually have left her with someone else for the entire working day, but, at the moment at least, I’m hugely relieved that I feel I can trust the people who will be looking after her.

And, for now, that’s my spoonful of sugar.