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Mums are seemingly now little more than workers for the state. When will we listen to women? Not very soon it seems, some think-tanks are pushing for mums on Universal Credit to get unlimited free childcare to get these women back into work as quickly as possible.
But neuroscience takes a different view. The science shows that dumping under-twos into a nursery for long periods of time will have a negative impact on later school behaviour and does little to boost social skills and all important cognitive development. The best thing to do is read to your children. Putting babies into childcare likely damages cognitive skills and later behaviour. And yet a third of British one year olds are placed in childcare facilities for an average of 21 hours a week.
The way we hand out money to parents of very young children has a clear message: get back to work. This is a deliberate government policy, not so much a nudge as a great big shove.
These government payments are always presented as offering parents choice. It is a form of choice that would make even Henry Ford wince. You can make any choice around the care of your child you like as long as you put them into the care of someone else you don’t know, outside your own home, with dozens of other children.
Rumour has it that Treasury bean counters have been quietly working away on plans to subsidise more childcare places after discovering such a more would rake in tens of billions of pounds in extra tax. It won’t be long before we have boarding schools for toddlers.
Some Conservatives are able to see the problem. Earlier this month, Tory peer Lord Farmer presented a backbench bill which would frontload child benefit so parents can bag more of this cash in the first few years and less of it later on. We should just give parents the cash and let them decide if they are that keen on putting toddlers into long hours of nursery care. After all we shell out £35 billion a year in childcare allowances, benefits and payments to sub-contract parenting to nurseries.
Anyone who has spent sleepless nights and fraught days with a toddler will know how tough it can be. No one who has been through the toddler treadmill would propose a system which forces parents into isolation with their tiny offspring, but our current approach to childcare is pegged at the opposite extreme of a spectrum. All work and no child play.
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