What to do with the ankle biters?

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.