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What to do with the ankle biters?

By Glynne Sutcliffe - posted Friday, 5 September 2008


Given the existence of a problem, government, once it has been forced into acknowledging that the problem does indeed exist, very often devises a solution that makes the problem worse. We may be about to witness something like this with the designation of the energetic, intelligent, beautiful and charming Maxine McKew, MP, as Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childcare and Education.

It may be that even the title of this newly created position could be regarded as a facet of the way government is prone to deepening an acknowledged problem, rather than thinking through the basics and dealing with the problem at its source. The result is that both the problem and the answer are equally institutionalised. The problem hasn’t gone away, there is just an institutionalised way of dealing with it.

There is a certain dynamic process that generates this kind of outcome. The tipping point seems to occur when the problem, whatever it is, reaches a magnitude where it suddenly becomes not merely a matter of distress to some people, but a job opportunity for others. Government is then persuaded to allocate funding to pay salaries for the answer-providing job seekers. Voila! The problem is entrenched! Two groups of people are supposedly now happy citizens - those who had the problem, and those who have provided a (sort of) solution.

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So what is the problem? Well, basically, it is the children - the little ones, the ankle biters, the rug rats. Or, as the education bureaucrats would prefer to have it, the problem is to understand what to do with Our Children, the Future. The sensitive among my readers will pick up on a certain proprietorial tone here, embedded in sanctimony. Our Children, who are The Future of Our Community. Very resonant!

Once upon a time children belonged to their families. Now they belong to everyone - “everyone” in this context meaning Our Community. (Those who are less enthusiastic and who refer to Our Community as The State, speak darkly of “the appropriation of children by the state” as a social evil institutionalised at a level that prevents even the recognition that, like redistributive taxation, it is a profound, wicked and socially destructive theft.)

Children began to be a problem when women walked out on them, choosing employment acknowledged with a weekly, fortnightly or monthly pay cheque, rather than “drudgery” at home.

There were two main problems with staying at home. While housework may sometimes be drudgery, it isn’t something that needs 40 hours a week of drudgery. So it probably wasn’t the quantum of work at home that made it unattractive. Its relentlessness may have had something to do with it. But what was more problematic was the isolation of staying at home with small children and no adult company, except company that could be organised around visiting or outings. Very often these were playground or playgroup outings that allowed women as mothers to congregate, but deprived them of social contact with other adults with diverse interests and backgrounds.

Add to this the total absence of discretionary purchasing power, except for money that could be filched from the household budget.

Meantime husbands were seemingly developing rather more glamorous, professional, career lines, or, at the very least, having more company and more excitement built into the warp and weft of their everyday lives. Envy bit hard into female souls. With paid work would come money and power, fun and freedom, self-realisation and a socially acknowledged existence. Who wouldn’t have walked out?

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Well actually, new Jewish mothers on the early kibbutzes refused to work any longer in the fields, and got themselves allocated jobs in the dining rooms and kitchens, so as to be near the nurseries and their new-borns. For this they earned the obloquy of the early women’s movement, who saw them as betraying the movement’s hard won “right to work”, and giving ammunition to the Neanderthals who proclaimed that a women’s place was at home, and her proper work to be found in mothering and caring. Jewish mothers were known head-cases anyway, so everyone (in this case taking everyone to mean movement women, nulliparous women, unmarried women, lesbians, politicians and employers) could afford to ignore this odd behaviour.

We should pass over quickly the fact that once the majority of women were receiving regular pay cheques not only were they were “liberated” from their husbands, and from any economic incentive to smooth over domestic spats. They also inevitably became, with their families, reliant on their pay cheques as part of the budget - to pay, for instance, for the house, or the furniture, or the car, or even just for the groceries.

For prices followed that rule familiar to economists, of rising to mop up all available cash. With two earning adults there was a higher per household income. So of course prices rose, and locked women into working for money irrespective of children. So either children didn’t get conceived, or if they were conceived they were as often as not aborted.

With the stresses thus engendered the divorce now described as an inevitable part of the career of a marriage left women economically even more dependent on maintaining paid employment, unless the children were very young, in which case “the state” was called upon to step in and provide cash for the groceries. As Adelaide’s Michael Atkinson once said to me, they are married to the state, aren’t they?

So this grand revolution, which I admit once bedazzled me also, had as its outcome women in paid work, or women bringing up little kids on the Centrelink dole. In both cases their personal lives were shattered, either filled with work or with uncles.

Men, burnt just as badly, resented the draconian regime of the Child Support Agency, couldn’t remarry without extreme financial stress, and frequently lost touch with their children. Then the anger of the second wife became identified as a social problem! (My suggestion - no woman should allow herself to get attached to a man with an existing family, even if he is not living with them.)

The current discussion of paid maternity leave is a belated recognition that women are people whose bodies produce new citizens, the most valuable commodity of anything made by anyone. And as producers they deserve economic security as well as social recognition and acclaim. However the debate is framed in a way that denies these truths, in favour of a charitable gloss, which pretends that paid maternity leave is some kind of nuisance entitlement which will be resentfully paid because otherwise women won’t have babies. (It is possible that this negotiating power is the only useful by-product of the contraceptive revolution).

Well, it is a complicated story, but at this stage of the story’s progression it has become apparent that the institutions devised to give young mothers the freedom to continue working in paid employment are pretty bad for the children, while not being too good for them or the men either.

It turns out that childcare rots the children’s brains as well as their souls. It seems young children, like the little lost humpback whale trying to suckle the bottom of a boat off the coast of Sydney recently, need their mothers, and mothering. And childcare just doesn’t deliver. Even pretty walls, decorated with the latest finger-painting, healthy mid-morning snacks, lots of blocks and a kindly staff haven’t been enough to make up for the mother’s absence. Worse, the mothers in their places of paid employment have been fighting a pervasive sense of guilt - the younger the baby they have left, the greater the guilt. This means that the mothers are not psychologically free to be good workers. So employers are unhappy as well. So what to do?

Well, it seems the government thinks it is obvious - one must increase the number of staff at childcare centres, so that the ratio of staff to children gets down to one staff member for three babies. Don’t worry that the biological mother and child are still separated. If staff turnover is a problem for a baby’s or toddler’s need for stable (read holistic) relationships, start addressing the problem of “churn”. Then introduce learning environments so that children’s brains will encounter an external world sufficiently stimulating to provoke them into learning. Don’t worry that this is not a young child’s preferred method of learning.

Childcare centres will thus add brain food-provisioning as part of their quality upgrade. Governments role here is to pay for highly trained staff to come by for 15 hours a week to teach the four-year-olds their colours and numbers and shapes and how to write their name on a chalkboard. Dr Pangloss will give his blessing - all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Preparing the children properly for the rigors of primary school, we will have solved the problems of literacy acquisition almost in passing.

I think it’s called digging a pit for yourself and then jumping in, taking the kids with you. In mid-jump you scream.

PS - while not wanting to invoke the Wrath of Kali to descend upon me, I would like to quietly suggest that there is a certain significance to be pondered in the circumstance that, to my knowledge, no one of Australia’s current holy trinity of Julia Gillard, Penny Wong and Maxine McKew has actually born a child.

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About the Author

Glynne Sutcliffe MA (Chicago) BA (Hons Hist) Dip Ed (Melb) is a Director of the Early Reading Play School in South Australia.

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