Childcare is mothercare

When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she could write. My grandmother lived far away in Scotland and no formal childcare existed. Still, my mother wanted to write. In bald economic terms, you could say that she was trying to rejoin the workforce to boost GDP and spare the state handouts. Forty years on, she doesn’t see it like that. ‘I needed to work to feel normal again – I didn’t want to go mad,’ she says, unapologetically.

Had she been in the same predicament now, she could have looked forward to the welfare reforms that promise working parents of children in England between the ages of nine months and two years up to 30 hours of funded childcare. Building on the existing scheme for children between the ages of three and four, Jeremy Hunt’s pledges significantly expand the welfare state, almost doubling the figure spent on childcare to £8 billion. 

These reforms lean towards a more Scandinavian approach to childcare and are overwhelmingly popular with voters, but they are considered by the childcare sector to be unrealistic, because of funding issues, staff shortages and availability of spaces.

As a working mother of two children, aged six years and nine months, the entire narrative feels confused. Instead of asking whether I should work or look after my children – a binary I long ago accepted as one of feminism’s unforgiveable failures – I wonder if there might be a case for affordable, state-funded childcare to improve maternal mental health. It would stop women feeling like they might go mad.

Women deserve help with childcare, but without the grinding rhetoric of ‘productivity’ or ‘increased GDP’. We need childcare that tries to allay some of the damage of what Adrienne Rich has termed ‘the institution of intensive motherhood’, which she described in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.