IT IS A TRUTH insufficiently acknowledged that childcare gurus are often a bit nuts. One thinks of John B. Watson, who thought that it was wrong to hug boys, Mrs Sydney Frankenburg, who insisted that young teeth would not grow if you overstimulated the brain, and Locke’s theory that infants should sleep on a different surface every night. Babies have always been plagued by theorists.
So when you find a guru willing to change his mind when evidence and humanity prompt, you rejoice. For me, Steve Biddulph — one of the most popular ones in the world, with four million books sold — is the man.
For one thing, he is Australian, hence impervious to our weird class prejudices. For another, he was one of the first modern writers to admit that small boys are different from girls.
Now he risks his neck by cautioning that putting children under 3 into nurseries all day may seriously damage their development. He saw the best nurseries “struggle to meet the needs of very young children in a group setting”. The worst were “negligent, frightening and bleak — a nightmare of bewildered loneliness that was heartbreaking to watch”. He supported early nursery once; he has looked and recanted.
A year or so on from tonight’s Valentine promises, you lovers could be staring hollow-eyed at one of the hairiest decisions of adult life. Especially if you are educated, aspiring professionals. Here’s the baby, the loveliest thing on earth; here’s the huge mortgage, here’s the career. The baby is unquestionably king, but without the mortgage he won’t have a home and without the career there won’t be a mortgage. Even if you set aside the plight of the unsupported parent, things are unreasonably tough these days. Two jobs, in an unforgivingly ambitious and competitive world, just mean two sets of sharks and typhoons to negotiate.
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But the infant needs looking after all day and does not know the meaning of compromise. If you go to work, who will step forward with love and joy? Granny is miles away (and probably far older than grannies used to be). Nannies are for the wealthiest few, unless you cut corners and opt to leave your baby alone in your house all day with someone even more inexperienced than you, who barely speaks English and who is is adrift in a new city.
A cosy neighbourhood childminder might be the answer: but in the mobile, commuting middle-class it is hard for a young working woman ignorant of babies to spot a good childminder even if she sees one. For a brisk regimented person in a suit it is far more reassuring to head for a “professional” institution with a brochure. Besides, leaving a child so soon brings on a pang of guilt that is assuaged by feeling that expensive childcare is somehow, in the ghastly league-table phrase, “adding value” to your child.
Thus, nurseries flourish and, crucially, take in ever-younger children. One in 20 British families now puts a baby in a nursery all day from the age of six months, and the trend is rising. In attacks on Steve Biddulph, commentators will no doubt brandish reports showing that children who go to nursery do better at school: but look closely and such reports invariably refer to children using nurseries between 3 and 5 years old. Compared with a baby these are great big thumping confident creatures: they can talk and tell their parents what they don’t like. Smaller infants can’t. If you want to be really miserable, watch a tape of the BBC’s recent undercover filming of apparently respectable nurseries where clinging baby bewilderment was routinely met with crude cries of “Ow, shurrup whingeing, Leanne!”.
We need to be subtle and precise, not to lump all pre-school children together. The first two or three years are critical: they lay down a foundation of confidence, trust and understanding of what it is to be human. A baby’s best option is to be cared for by someone who loves and responds to it (even alongside distractions of siblings, housework, or part-time telework). This person does not need “qualifications”. It may be a parent or a relative, a childminder in her own home, or a paid nanny who is stable, kind and committed.
But it is very hard indeed for a nursery assistant to achieve the same level of familiar loving empathy. It is particularly hard if she is an underpaid girl of low intelligence who has never raised a child; or a foreigner working an illegal 70-hour week on a student visa and not daring to complain about her £2 a hour, lest she be thrown out. I knew one such who said she often used to fall asleep during the day; I looked up her nursery’s Ofsted inspection and it passed. It was certainly making a healthy profit for its sweet-faced shark of a manageress.
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There are good nurseries; there are probably babies reasonably well cared for in a group, if the staffing is consistent and skilled. But even at £7,500 a year this is a poor substitute for mother-love: Steve Biddulph is right to say so. A young baby needs a person not a place, not “affordable care” but devoted care. Perhaps not all day long, but for a good part of it.
We ought to swallow this truth and what it means for society. Employers must learn to be flexible, accept gaps in the CV and use long-distance IT creatively. It has never been easier to keep absent workers in touch with developments or to use their skills. Employers must pay the price of retaining talented, trained, and high-principled staff (opting to look after your child in its short years of greatest need is a very high-principled thing to do). Government must stop obsessing about tickbox nursery “education” and think how to make it easier for families to organise personal babycare, not just how to squeeze them into a system where each childcare “place” means a mother out earning and paying tax.
Above all, soaring house prices must be understood as the great social evil that they are, and fought all the way. We owe those babies a couple of years each, we really do.
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