Home truths about mothers

If the Government promoted staying at home as a valid lifestyle choice we might see some progress

IT IS something that has always struck me as odd: how a Labour Government that rode to power on its determination to shake off its old socialist mores should embrace a model of child-rearing so Marxist in hue.

How else was it possible to view Tony Blair's vision of wrap-around care – where children aged from three to 14 would spend up to 10 hours every day at breakfast clubs, school and after-school clubs – than as a contemporary twist on the philosopher's theory that the family is a nasty, bourgeois concept; that women ought to be liberated from caring from their own babies and that the best way to raise children is collectively?

Instead of heralding a brave new world, however, this exercise in social engineering conjured up for me an image of bleak, over-populated institutions, where emotionally under-nourished children dreamed of riding their bikes or listening to music; and of tired mothers whose contact with their children was more or less confined to getting them up in the morning and putting them to bed at night.

Gordon Brown's commitment to the same agenda seemed more in tune with his overall outlook. But I still couldn't get my head round the myopia of a Government that was prepared to subsidise childcare for mothers who wanted to work, yet treated those who would rather stay at home as unworthy of financial support. And all this while it agonised over the problem of a falling birthrate and the pensions timebomb.

Last week, it transpired Professor Jay Belsky, an adviser to Brown, feels much the same way. In a speech to a seminar in Germany, Belsky – the man brought in to evaluate the Sure Start initiative – said parents who want to bring up their children at home should be given tax breaks as an incentive. "The risks are that more hours in any kind of childcare across the first four and a half years of life and, independently, the more time in childcare centres, the higher the levels of problem behaviour," warned Belsky, the director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck College in London.

Personally I'm not so sure it is productive to play the "nurseries-blight-your-children's-lives" card. All families are different. There are mothers who want to work, need to work and are better parents for it, and there are children who flourish in a nursery environment. In any case, most mothers feel guilty enough about leaving their children without well-meaning academics adding to their burden.

High quality, flexible child care is crucial in a society where women make a valuable contribution to the workforce. In fact, I believe that child care in this country still isn't subsidised enough to make going back to work feasible for those with larger families and low-paid jobs. However, there are also many mothers who would prefer not to work, but can't afford to stay at home. And there are others worried about the stigma of giving up their careers at a time when those who do are castigated for failing to pay back the cost of their education, as suggested in a recent report by the UK Government's women and equality unit.

The contribution stay-at-home mothers make to society is no less important and they ought to be helped to achieve their goals. It is not that modern women are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices; that they are grasping materialists who expect to be financially rewarded for what was once done for love. It's simply that rising house prices have made it impossible for most couples to survive on one income. We are not talking about having to do without a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes here, but being unable to keep on top of household bills.

The potential benefits of more intensive parental input have never been more obvious. With so much energy devoted, rightly or wrongly, to hand-wringing over the lack of respect young people have for authority, there would be political as well as social rewards to be reaped from a shift in emphasis.

There are plenty of measures the Government could introduce. It could allow stay-at-home mothers to transfer their unused tax allowance to their husbands, a move which could save them several thousand pounds a year. Or it could follow in the footsteps of Finland and France, which give mothers who give up work to look after small children a home care allowance of up to £400 a month. Most importantly, it could back down on its recent refusal to allow mothers who have taken time out a chance to make up for missed national insurance contributions so they are eligible for a full state pension on retirement.

On top of the financial support, however, it would be good to see a change in the way Labour politicians present stay-at-home mothers. Last year, the then health secretary Patricia Hewitt acknowledged the Government had given the impression it believed women should be out working as soon as their babies are a few months old and said she thought that had been a mistake.

Her views have not yet been echoed by her colleagues. But if they began to promote staying at home not as a cop-out, but as a valid lifestyle choice, we might actually see some progress.

Then perhaps TV dramas would stop portraying stay-at-home mothers either as feckless lay-abouts who struggle to control their broods or yummy mummies whose toughest challenge is to juggle their children's tumble tots with their pilates class. And women who give up their jobs to look after their children would stop answering the question: "And what do you do?" with a mumbled and apologetic: "I'm just a mum."