Childcare is mothercare

When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she could write. My grandmother lived far away in Scotland and no formal childcare existed. Still, my mother wanted to write. In bald economic terms, you could say that she was trying to rejoin the workforce to boost GDP and spare the state handouts. Forty years on, she doesn’t see it like that. ‘I needed to work to feel normal again – I didn’t want to go mad,’ she says, unapologetically.

Had she been in the same predicament now, she could have looked forward to the welfare reforms that promise working parents of children in England between the ages of nine months and two years up to 30 hours of funded childcare. Building on the existing scheme for children between the ages of three and four, Jeremy Hunt’s pledges significantly expand the welfare state, almost doubling the figure spent on childcare to £8 billion. 

These reforms lean towards a more Scandinavian approach to childcare and are overwhelmingly popular with voters, but they are considered by the childcare sector to be unrealistic, because of funding issues, staff shortages and availability of spaces.

As a working mother of two children, aged six years and nine months, the entire narrative feels confused. Instead of asking whether I should work or look after my children – a binary I long ago accepted as one of feminism’s unforgiveable failures – I wonder if there might be a case for affordable, state-funded childcare to improve maternal mental health. It would stop women feeling like they might go mad.

Women deserve help with childcare, but without the grinding rhetoric of ‘productivity’ or ‘increased GDP’. We need childcare that tries to allay some of the damage of what Adrienne Rich has termed ‘the institution of intensive motherhood’, which she described in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. We need childcare as a form of social infrastructure that acts as a way of preserving mental stability.

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Could these be the online comments of young Kemi Badenoch?

Maternal mental health is in dire straits. A study published by the Maternal Mental Health Alliance last year revealed that ‘suicide continues to be the leading cause of direct maternal death between six weeks and 12 months after birth, accounting for 39 per cent of deaths in this period’. Additionally, the rate of maternal death was found to have risen by 15 per cent in the last ten years. According to a report published by the LSE, NHS spending on perinatal mental health stands at £8.1 billion per birth-year cohort.

The pandemic – when childcare collapsed – provided the perfect conditions in which to study the relationship between maternal mental health and childcare. Research carried out by Dr Claire Crawford at the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that mothers whose children were not prioritised to return to school during 2020 suffered a drop in mental health ‘similar to the decrease in the run-up to a divorce or a partner’s job loss’. Overwhelmingly it was mothers who shouldered this burden: ‘We find no effects on the mental health of fathers,’ she adds.

In America, where affordable childcare is largely nonexistent, the focus is shifting towards maternal mental health. Rather than tying the issue to economic productivity (a compelling case for corporate groups but clearly not powerful enough to create meaningful reform), talk has turned to psychiatric distress. Activists such as Dr Molly Dickens, founder of the Maternal Stress project, have begun to argue for childcare subsidies for the sake of women’s health. Change is afoot – witness social media activism by groups such as Chamber of Mothers and Brené Brown – but progress is slow. As Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, tells me: ‘Plenty of policymakers are not sufficiently moved by people struggling with their mental health… the economic argument prevails here still – but has not succeeded.’

A large part of the problem is that ‘mental health’ has been subsumed into a ‘wellness’ narrative: think ‘mum’ influencers such as Stacey Solomon carping about ‘me time’ to her five million Instagram followers. But this is not just about individual needs: if mothers feel more stable because childcare is easily available, all of society collectively benefits. Childcare is mothercare.

I think back through my own mother, as Virginia Woolf so perfectly put it. I think of her rushing home to our empty house and beginning to work. I think (now I know it all too well myself) of the nagging worry that must have freighted each word, the way the clock would have raced around until she had to stop and retrieve me. Can any government – Labour or Conservative – fix that feeling?