Robin Barker’s book Baby Love, published 30 years ago, has long been the bible for many new parents who embrace her commonsense approach to those often fraught early months and years. But there’s one piece of advice I suspect many feel they can’t afford to take on board: Barker’s belief that childcare is not a great option for very little babies.
When I interviewed the former midwife and pediatric and family nurse in 2017, she said that, if asked, she told mothers: “Try not to go back to work for the first year if you can. Childcare is a terrible strain on toddlers; they just want to be with their mother.
“Sad fact. They don’t socialise well, so they’re all day with other toddlers who want to bite them and bash them, and they get sick – they pick up everything that’s going. Their stage of development isn’t good for group care, it just isn’t.
“Three years of age is reasonable to go to childcare, but whenever I say that, it’s incredibly unpopular because then you are accused of making mothers feel guilty. I do understand there are people who don’t have any alternative.”
That lack of an alternative is surely something we all understand now – the difficulties of surviving on a single wage in an economy in which family housing depends on two incomes. What is perhaps less appreciated is the stark choice for parents: stay home or put your baby into the care of strangers.
Barker was talking about emotional impact, not protection from pedophiles, but her comments are interesting amid the furore over alleged assaults in some Victorian centres.
She is still on the case and on July 4 wrote to this newspaper on the question of child safety and the “mythology” of outsourced care, to say: “Parents must be helped to work out ways to minimise group care rather than being brainwashed into believing it’s essential and that other people know more about caring for their babies and toddlers than they do.”
An easy solution would be for women – and yes, it inevitably would be women – to decide to stay home longer. But Barker recognised the impracticality of that in her 2017 interview with me: “When I had my kids in the 1970s, most women didn’t go back to work until their children were at school, or if they did it would be to a part-time job. On the other hand, we didn’t love being at home. There’s a dilemma there that’s not solved. Staying home with toddlers and babies – many of us did that with gritted teeth … I don’t think there’s an answer.”
It’s true some women could afford to disrupt their careers for two or three years before going back to work after giving birth. It’s true many choose to work on because they fear they will never catch up if they step away from the desk. It’s also true many mothers – and fathers – are not keen to spend long days in the often tedious task of caring for very young children. And, above all, it’s the case that many women believe they risk the hard-won gains of feminism if they opt for full-time motherhood. After all, it is often the pay cheque, rather than an enlightened male, that delivers equality. Money equals power, even in a marriage. All of which makes a retreat from outsourced care highly unlikely.
As a non-mother, I haven’t had to choose between work and childcare. Indeed, those of us who have never seen inside a childcare centre have generally avoided the complex emotions parents face when placing their children into care.
But the recent allegations of abuse force us all to think about how and why we’ve ended up in a place that makes parents choose between the risks to their babies and the risk to their careers and family stability.
So, here’s a controversial suggestion, one seen by some as a knee-jerk reaction: is it time to seriously debate whether we should continue to allow male carers to deal with non-verbal children? Banning male carers from changing nappies or rocking tiny babies to sleep is an unpopular idea in an age of gender equality yet it is a practical response to parental fears of pedophilia.
It would not be so difficult to implement, given only 3-4 per cent of childcare workers are male and restricting their work to children who are two to three years old would not have a huge impact. Indeed it is likely some centres will quietly change the roles of male workers in response to the anxieties of parents. I give it a few months.
Some male carers would doubtless welcome the change, given how hyper-vigilant they have to be to avoid any suggestion of wrongdoing.
Most of us have welcomed the entry of men into childcare as a modern extension of the role fathers have been encouraged to take up in recent decades, proof that we no longer see babies and families as women’s work.
A blanket ban on men when the overwhelming majority behave appropriately may seem like overkill, adding to the panic, rather than addressing the issue through improved screening and monitoring. But as a mother, grandmother and former teacher told me this week: if we don’t want male teachers sleeping in the same dorm as our 13-year-old daughters when they are away on school camp, should we allow 20-year-old male strangers to perform the very intimate work of changing the nappies of our six-month-old babies?
There are big philosophical questions about the outsourcing of parenting and the role of women in the family unit. There are practical questions about the benefits of childcare, as outlined by Barker. Indeed the childcare scandal has emerged as the politics of parenting are increasingly heated. But even so, keeping the kids at home until they turn three is not an option for most families.
Given that paid childcare is here to stay, is it worth considering some practical methods of limiting the risk of predators in the babies’ room?