In defence of the 70s nanny state

This summer’s outstanding movie, Roma, offers a nuanced — and deeply unfashionable — take on power in the domestic economy.

Mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron with actresses Mariana de Tavira, left, and Yalitza Aparicio on the red carpet for their film Roma in Mexico City. Picture: AP

This summer’s outstanding movie, Roma, has as its central character an indigenous Mexican servant who “rescues” her middle-class family emotionally and physically in almost every frame. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron and dedicated to the real-life nanny-cum-housekeeper of his own childhood, the film challenges conventional judgments of relationships between masters and servants.

In one pivotal scene the grandmother of the household takes the pregnant and unmarried nanny to an upmarket department store to buy a crib for the unborn child. Far from tossing her out of the house when her pregnancy is revealed — and remember this is the 1970s — the family assumes a high level of responsibility that includes shopping for the kind of expensive bassinet they would buy for their own. And why not? We have already seen how deeply entwined Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio) is in this family — in ways both exploitative and loving.

As we absorb the shopping scene, all hell breaks out in the street below as student protesters are gunned down. We view it all through the eyes of the terrified women as they make their escape. Two dramatic views of class.

Cuaron is not asking us to rewind the political and social changes of the past 50 years: back then Aparicio could well have been a servant, but she was in fact studying to be a schoolteacher.

Indeed by the end of the film we see Cleo’s life is both secured and limited in profound ways by a system that provides such cheap labour for a family that is both selfish and grateful. Nor is the director making an economic argument for the chasm between the privileged middle-class descendants of Europeans and the indigenous tribes of ­Mexico.

But he is offering a nuanced — and of course deeply unfashionable — take on power in the domestic economy.

And this is what resonates at a time when our own domestic economies are often the scene of major distress, thanks in large part to the absence of nannies, ­exploited or otherwise.

I am not advocating a two-tier wages system to allow middle-class families to hire live-in housekeepers and childminders. We cannot go down that route.

But the contrast between the Roma set-up, where both emotional and physical needs are provided by a nanny, and the pressure-cooker arrangements in households financed by two working parents is intriguing.

At one level, Australian families — like those across the West — have become adept followers of the Mexican way portrayed in the film. We routinely buy care for our children as well as our ageing parents: it’s just that our wage structure generally prevents us from hiring live-in providers. There is a huge gap between our households and those where servants get the kids out of bed in the morning as well as do the laundry. It’s deeply unfashionable, indeed heretical, to suggest we have lost as well as gained by turning the live-in nannies of 1970s Australia (our mothers) into wage-earners. Even more dangerous when it comes from someone like me, who has not had to make any concessions to family in decades of full-time work. But it’s clear to all of us — childless or not — that something has to give if we are to manage the stress and tensions of a society where everyone expects to pursue paid work and most people rely on two incomes to manage the mortgage.

Part-time work, for men as well as women, is one answer. So is a change in our expectations of fathers, so often enabled by women into a life free of remembering the kids need to be fed each day. Some women and men step back and put careers on hold for several years with mixed outcomes in terms of resentment and contentment.

There’s also the grandparent phenomenon in which the middle-aged return to the parks and playgrounds they stopped attending 30 or 40 years ago. This unpaid care is a boon for the workers but does not always make economic sense. Just think about it — Nana leaves the workforce early to allow her daughter to return to work full-time. The GDP boost that is supposed to happen through increased female participation is discounted by the exit of an experienced worker at the other end. And don’t even start calculating the cost to the community of people no longer available for other volunteer work or the care of older family members.

It’s all very messy.

Individuals will make their own arrangements and some will even be able to employ live-in housekeepers. But the society-wide solutions surely must involve much more cheap state and corporate childcare for preschoolers and nannies in the shape of after-school carers. How else to overcome the craziness of a school system that sends kids out the gate at 3pm and asks their mothers (and it is almost always the mothers) to stay at the desk till 5pm and often much, much later?

We are justifiably proud of a society that refuses to use cheap Filipino labour to babysit the kids and do the dishes.

But those standards come at a price in the shape of stressed adults, kids desperately seeking the attention of busy parents, and home and offices weakened by poor mental health and distracted participants.

Perhaps it’s time to compare the costs and, like Cuaron, revisit our childhoods with a more nuanced eye than has been allowed in recent decades.

Helen Trinca is the editor of The Deal magazine.