The average woman in Scotland is now estimated to bear 1.75 children over her life expectancy of 81 years. So (with overlap) Ms McAverage will have one or two pre-school children for about six years of her life.
The big idea of the SNP’s White Paper was that in an independent Scotland babies from 12 months old would spend 30 hours a week in institutions. More recently the Scottish Government funded Commission for Child Care Reform has recommended that three year olds should spend 50 hours a week in group care – two hours a week more than the EU working time directive for adults. And Nicola Sturgeon has announced that, irrespective of the White Paper, if she’s re-elected in 2016 she would double the childcare subsidy and send vulnerable two year olds and all three and four year olds to nursery for 30 hours a week.
Why? Are babies and young children desperate to escape their parents? Is Ms McAverage such a dreadful mother that her children can only survive with plenty of exposure to childcare professionals?
When New Labour first introduced universal pre-school provision the idea was that a couple of hours a day in a nursery from age three would benefit a child’s development, although recent research has questioned that. The only firm evidence is that in the most desperate circumstances, time in nursery is better than being with an alcoholic or drug abusing parent. Nonetheless, the theory that all infants benefit from more and more nursery from an ever younger age has become a universally accepted truth. And the distinction between early years education and childcare has become blurred, so while political manifestos promise tots more hours in childcare, there’s no commitment to improving the quality of early year settings.
To be fair the SNP is just playing catch up with the Tory/Libdem coalition, under which England has lead the way with increased nursery hours for two – four year olds. Originally ‘free’ nursery hours were for vulnerable two year olds, but England now boasts that 40% of two year olds are using the free nursery provision. Either a staggering 40% of all two year olds in England are ranked as vulnerable or the initial policy was trojan horse.
Scandinavian feminism has a concept called familialisation/defamilialisation. The theory is that familialism or caring for one’s nearest and dearest without renumeration, always disadvantages women economically. So the state should replace families (defamilialisation); and most care, including child and elderly care, should be conducted by paid workers. Interestingly, in Sweden, which leads the way on this, the paid care work is still overwhelmingly done by women, while men dominate in the high status and industrial sectors. No matter, because by moving care work out of the home for kinfolk and into institutions for cash, Sweden can claim to have boosted its GDP.
But what if many, even most, women would actually prefer to look after their own children while they’re young? Do people’s preferences and life satisfaction count for anything?
Finland is one place where mothers are given an allowance as cash or nursery subsidy. With a fairly even playing field, over half of women with young children choose to look after them themselves. However, this policy is criticised by the OECD for failing to send mums straight back to work. And, as a small country with a fragile economy, it’s unlikely that generous family allowances will continue indefinitely in Finland.
Some Western countries are worried about falling birth rates. Scandinavian countries like to claim that their higher than the European average birth rate is entirely down to massive institutional childcare subsidies. It’s true that in countries like Italy and Japan, where welfare payments are loaded into the final decades of life, birthrates are lower. But birthrates in the US, UK and Ireland are at least equal to Scandinavia with far less childcare subsidy. France also has a high birthrate and claims high maternal employment rates, but in reality French women get a whopping three years maternity leave (+ holidays) per child and can take that back to back. It could be argued that countries where lots of children are born out of wedlock (mostly English speaking and Nordic countries) have higher birthrates than those that encourage marriage.
Our UK Welfare State is funded through general current taxation and borrowing. Unlike the German social insurance model, our system assumes endless productivity and population growth to keep funding previous commitments – it’s effectively a Ponzi scheme. But now, thanks partly to our Welfare State, we have an ageing population and declining birth rate. It’s been said that if the UK state pension age had kept pace with life expectancy retirement age would now be 85!
Perhaps mindful of the way older people voted in the 2014 referendum, Nicola Sturgeon announced that she would cap retirement age at 65 and has been quite indignant at the suggestion that state pension age could rise. She is correct that, as poorer people have shorter life expectancy, they’ll enjoy a shorter period of state pension. But, if she retires at 65, the average woman in Scotland can still expect 16 years in retirement. So time with ones grandchildren/dogs/allotment is sacrosanct, but time with ones own babies and toddlers is considered detrimental to GDP and gender equality.
Many now hold Sweden’s childcare model up as the ideal. But there are other options; for instance is there a link between the rise in childcare and the decline in home ownership since the five years of the Tory/LibDem coalition? Are young families just being suckered into working longer and harder for less and less?
What about doing more to tackle ageism in the workplace, or active labour market policies for women returning to work after a few years caring full time for children and the home? How about loading family allowances into the early years of a child’s life instead of spreading them out to young adulthood? Most importantly, both for parents with young children and for older workers, what about promoting part-time jobs with decent conditions and regular hours? Germany and the Netherlands have both tried to improve the status of part-time jobs, but we never hear a peep from them over the Swedish childcare din.
Of course we need to boost the working age population to keep up with the ageing population and, along with immigration and raising the retirement age, getting women back into the workplace is a good way to do that. But there’s a time and a place for these things. Can politicians of all hues please ease off the attack on what is, after all, a very fleeting period of life?
Lucy Hunter BLackburn says
A really necessary counter-blast to the prevailing debate. Why are we obsessed with warehousing babies and toddlers from happy (enough) competent (enough) homes while being utterly useless at providing wrap around care for older children at school – whose starting and ending times and holiday hours are completely incompatible with most jobs, reducing their mothers employment choices drastically for many more years than the brief early years? It’s because the debate is driven too little by people who have been there themselves.