The Labour Party are the 'party of the working person'. They want fairness, equality (so long as they remain more equal than the rest of us), for all workers to be paid a 'living wage'. You can't argue with that.
They also want 'wraparound' care for all primary school children between 8am and 6pm.
In an interview with the Guardian, the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister Yvette Cooper said childcare would be a "top priority" for Labour, as the party begins to set out its concrete policies ahead of the 2015 election.
"It's a really important issue for us and we want to go further than we have before," she said. "It's about supporting families, the economy and equality."
Hmmm. Supporting families by sending BOTH parents out to work all day and forcing them to farm their children out to day-care. Day-care which costs pretty much the same as someone on Minimum Wage will earn. Day-care which will substitute one-to-one attention from a loving parent with a handful of (predominantly) young girls overseeing a room full of kids, none of whom they have any emotional investment in.
Back in the 1950s, when the vast majority of mothers stayed at home to raise their children, Dr John Bowlby wrote of 'attachment' as the "relationship a young child has with it's main care-giver, usually the mother". How do we define 'main care giver' in the 21st century? Most mothers would insist that they are their children's main care giver, but if they drop the children off at school or nursery at 8am and collect them at 6pm as Ms Cooper advocates, spending perhaps 3 hours per day during the week with those children when the school or nursery has had them for 10 hours each day, how can they claim that title? 50 hours at school/nursery -v- 15 hours with Mummy - not much attachment there.
The relationship between a child and their primary care giver is immensely important, it really cannot be exaggerated. Professor Sir Denis Pereira Gray OBE writes that "a consistent, loving, parental relationship makes networks form in the developing brain which enable the child to handle stress in later life, achieve emotional self-control, and so relate sensitively to other people. These networks in the brain also influence emotional and physical health, such as obesity, in adulthood."
Scientific studies have also proved that levels of the stress hormone Cortisol are significantly higher in 3 to 4 year old children in day-care than those in a home environment. One study has found that the effect of day-care attendance on cortisol was even more marked in children under 36 months of age - showing that after five months in day-care, children who appeared to have 'settled' still had raised cortisol levels when compared to children spending the vast majority of time at home with a parent. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the loss of self-control and empathy caused by high cortisol levels may be passed on from one generation to the next, increasing with each generation - without wishing to exaggerate or scare-monger, we could be facing a future where children with stifled emotions grow into adults with no facility to empathise or show love to others - and the potential effects on society are frightening to contemplate.
The effect of stress on children cannot be underestimated. Stress can damage the pre-frontal cortex of the brain which is associated with an impaired control of emotions, inhibition, attention span, memory and cognitive flexibility. Strange that until 30-or-so years ago no-one had ever heard of ADHD - a phenomenon which appears wholly related to the push for women to work and sub-contract childcare to outsiders.
Returning to Sir Denis, he states that "formal day-care substitutes care by parent who loves the child with care by someone who doesn't. By ignoring love, we diminish motherhood, and parenthood, and discount one of their most precious strengths." He concludes that "good parent-small child relationships protect the child from stress, especially in the first two years of life".
In the face of this evidence, how can any political party argue for increased day-care provision for children? The money which would be spent on this (and don't get me started on where that money is supposed to come from!) would be much better spent on a transferable tax allowance between married couples, enabling more mothers (or fathers) to remain at home caring for their young children for longer.
Feminism isn't about wanting to be just like men. It isn't about wanting to work 9-til-5, commuting an hour each end, abdicating responsibility for your children to someone else, flopping onto the sofa with a large glass of wine at 9pm having finally got the kids to bed and the washing up done (and the washing machine emptied, the next load set on timer for tomorrow, the wet clothes on an airer, tomorrow's school uniform set out, packed lunches made, homework checked, school letters read & cheques written, the hoover run around the living room, the kitchen worktops wiped, the dog fed, the cat put out and another 5 jobs added to the ever increasing 'to do' list).
Feminism is about the right to choose, the ability to choose. What Labour's socialist pseudo-feminism has given us is quite the opposite. It has encouraged three generations of women to want it all, expect it all, but in return for 'it all' - the nice house, the new car, the foreign holidays, the designer handbags, the glittering career - it has made us into slaves willing to sell our children to the lowest bidder.
"If I didn't work we couldn't afford a holiday" - so your absence for 46 weeks of the year is justified by 2 weeks in Tuscany glugging Chianti and screaming "don't splash Mummy's Kindle!" at your children.
"If I didn't work we couldn't afford the mortgage payments" - because the four of you really need a 5 bedroom house in the smartest part of town which is £50k more than an identical one half a mile away simply because of the postcode.
"If I didn't work we couldn't afford a nice car" - because anything less than a BMW X5 would be social suicide on the school run.
The western world has got it's priorities all wrong. None of this matters, the house, the car, the career, especially not the handbags. What matters is the well-being of our children and the gift of love and security which we owe them and which will ensure that there is a civilised society in the future. When 'wraparound childcare' means a mother wrapping her arms around her child because she cares, then we will have got it right.
Feminist Misogynist -v- Wraparound Childcare.
*with thanks to Mothers at Home Matter for their article on Sir Denis's WAtCh lecture which I have quoted from.
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