It seems that most of the Sunday papers here and here for example, picked up on last week's report by Prof Jacqueline Scott 'Women and Employment: Changing Lives and New Challenges' which states that ‘fewer men and women believe that family life won't suffer if a woman goes out to work’. Her press release gives the salient points.
To say I was disappointed with the headlines is an understatement. Working women mocked; women who work being set up against those who don't; 'suffering' assumed to be innately bad; no mention of working men.... the simplistic approach is perplexing. Obviously a press-release can't do a whole book justice, but it does seem that a complex issue has been distilled into a stereotypical analysis that creates division. The questions asked seem to have made many assumptions, extrapolated details from generalisations and confused gender-equality with role-equality. Yet the issue there is not that men and women aren't equal, but that the status of paid work is far above that of being a parent. And that is one of the key problems - we have a Government that whether by tax credits or extended schools implies that the State can be a better parent than you can, thus undermining the crucial role of being a mother or father.
But back to the premise which is so damaging: being a working mother does not equal having deprived children. Deprived children are those who aren't loved with the unconditional, self-sacrificing, emotional-intelligence-developing and character-building love that every child needs in order to feel secure and to thrive. You will find them on both the streets of Peckham and the avenues of Dulwich, because it's not about income, not simply about who works - but love. And for those of us who do work and bend over backwards to ensure that our children know that they are loved, this book seems to be an insult.
The challenge for any working parent is protecting the space to give that love. The challenge for Government is twofold; to enable more families to have the choice for one of them to stay at home and look after their children, and secondly to work out all the different types of nudges that some parents need who don't seem to realise that the most important job they can do is to love their kids.
