Keep government out of childcare
We need to consider what children are for: Are they just burdens?
Last week I spoke at the AGM of the campaigning organisation Full Time Mothers (FTM). This is a group of educated, intellectual women who, since 1990, have supported women who have chosen to stay at home with their children rather than “go back to work”, as the current slang has it.
On the face of it, this would seem rather a conservative outfit. But in fact, FTM is a very radical organisation and surprisingly idler-friendly. It is certainly not anti-feminist. It is radical because it opposes government intervention in matters of child care. Member Jill Kirby, of the think tank Centre for Policy Studies, the other speaker at the AGM, points in her work to government’s stated intention to interfere. She quotes a report that, rather chillingly, announces how it means to develop “an overarching strategy for all children and young people from conception to age 19″.
FTM refuses to accept a government-led orthodoxy when it comes to arranging work and family life. It is highly critical, for example, of full-time day care for small children, arguing that, in the early years, the child needs its parents to be close by. It opposes the commercialisation and professionalisation of child care, and points to the unfair fact that the most generous Family Tax Credits are available only to families who use accredited child-care providers, a case surely of the one who pays the piper calling the tune.
FTM is also idler-friendly because it believes in spending time with children. It opposes the “hard-working family” model. In my talk, I discussed the benefits of both parents working as little as possible when children are small.
FTM wants to lobby government to create policies that are more friendly to the family with the stay-at-home mother. But I’m not convinced that effective change can be made through putting pressure on Parliament to alter legislation. Ever since the Tudors, when the state first started taking an interest in education and the rearing of children, government has been about imposing a uniform strategy on an unruly and varied populus. A different party in power would be no better: it is in the very nature of government itself to interfere and to plan overarching strategies.
The best thing surely would be to ignore government, as far as that is possible, and simply proceed as if it doesn’t exist. Then you can make up your own rules as far as work and family go.
On a deeper level, we perhaps need to consider what children are for. Are they just non-contributing burdens, which the state apparatus needs to mould, via pre-school, school and college, into hard-working, high-consuming adults?
The chairman of FTM later sent me an article by the Swedish writer Anna Wahlgren, who says the problem is that we do not see children as useful. Even from birth, they are accustomed to being viewed as an encumbrance. At best, they are encouraged to be little consumers, rather than producers. To give their lives meaning, we need to make them feel needed and get them involved in household chores: cooking, cleaning, baking bread, growing vegetables and feeding chickens.
“If we as parents needed our children and little by little, according to their will and capability, we put them to good use, then we could slowly change a social order that is already shaky.”
This is absolutely true: I find my children are never happier than when, for example, stuffing envelopes for Idler mail-outs. I get them in a little production line. They are doing something genuinely useful and they can feel it. Another example was when Arthur came to London with me for two days to clear out the office. He worked like a trouper. He later said it was the most fun thing he had done all year.
All of this is, of course, excellent news for the idle parent: children should be seen as a useful addition to the family labour force, rather than simply as cost and hassle. Bring back child labour.
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To all the above – Amen!!!
But I thought this was about being idle? How can putting children to productive use… work… be better for them?
Surely children are not at their happiest when working?
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I thank God for our Swedish state-sponsored nursaries so we can all afford to work if we want to. And an organasation like the one above will not be anti-feminist the day it’s called Full Time PARENTS, and it is just as common and normal for dads to stay at home. That day is sadly a long long time from now.
I thank God for our Swedish state-sponsored nursaries so we can all afford to work if we want to. And an organasation like the one above will not be anti-feminist the day it’s called Full Time PARENTS, and it is just as common and normal for dads to stay at home. That day is sadly a long long time from now.