“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?
