Almighty snub for the mother of all jobs

The Barnardos mother of the year award has been scrapped after 25 years and it feels like an almighty snub. While an awards ceremony is hardly a sufficient acknowledgement of the enormous task of raising a child, any event that places the spotlight on the unpaid, undervalued, invisible, critically essential work that parents and carers of children undertake is welcome.

Barnardos mother of the year 2019 Maria Worner.Credit: Fairfax

Barnardos scrapped the award because “the celebration of mothers in the absence of others does not truly represent the variety of families we celebrate in our contemporary world”.

But that fails to acknowledge that even in a broad variety of families it’s still mothers carrying the load. In Australia there’s no way around the fact that mothers undertake the lion’s share of raising children. Women in Australia make up 70 per cent of primary unpaid care workers for children.

Before the pandemic, women in heterosexual households in Australia with children did roughly double the hours of unpaid domestic work than men did. As a result of COVID-19, mothers spent an extra hour each day on unpaid housework and a further four extra hours on childcare.

Notwithstanding the love, joy and wonder parenting entails, it is work. Difficult, critically important work that has been readily dismissed as insignificant and inconsequential for too long. Despite being considered a luxury or “lifestyle choice”, Australian families having children is in the nation’s best interests. The viability of government spending long term depends upon population growth occurring. Given that migration is expected to plummet by 85 per cent this year and that the birth rate had slowed dramatically even before the pandemic hit, there is an urgent need to consider the reality of having and raising children in 2021.

In raising children parents, quite literally, have the future in their hands. And mostly the hands in question belong to mums.

Mothers are among the most discriminated against people on the planet. Mums, who work harder, for longer, for considerably less pay. After having a baby women in Australia tend to reduce their work significantly and rarely, if ever, return to working and earning in the way they did before children.

Even when they do stay attached to the workforce, mums are often paid less than dads for the same work, discriminated against, promoted less often and thus accumulate far less super. If any. The price mums pay for spending their lives caring is too often retiring in poverty. The fastest-growing group of Australians experiencing homelessness is women over 55.

Given the monetary value of unpaid care work in Australia is about $650.1 billion or 50.6 per cent of GDP it’s a devastating indictment on the lack of regard we have for those doing the bulk of this work. Mothers.

Against this backdrop, scrapping a program designed to acknowledge and elevate the work and value of mothers is hard to take.

Georgie Dent is the executive director of The Parenthood, an inclusive not-for-profit advocacy organisation that represents 68,000 parents, carers and supporters around Australia.