Anne
Manne
Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our
Children?
Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 318 pp,
1741143799
ANNE
MANNE’S BOOK Motherhood: How
Should We Care for Our Children?
arguably makes the greatest contribution
to the work–family debate in Australia
in years. Manne has drawn on a huge
range of resources — philosophical,
psychological, sociological, economic
and political — to create a thesis
that shows a way out of the current
quagmire of work–family relations.
Manne’s book has a fundamentally
important starting point: it addresses
the needs and desires of not just women
but also children. Manne says: ‘I
wanted to take those two utterly valuable
social goods, women’s emancipation
and child well-being, and try to put
them together.’ To the vast majority
of mothers, this is not revolutionary.
We deal with the tension between those
two, sometimes conflicting, needs every
day. However, in the context of the
public work–family debate, starting
with an explicit consideration of children’s
needs is unusual. Penelope Leach did
it in Children First: What Society
Must Do — And Is Not Doing —
for Children Today (1994), but an
astounding number of feminist commentators
write whole tomes on working motherhood
without any genuine attempt to grapple
with children’s needs. Writers
such as Joan K. Peters and Anne Summers
spring to mind.
In contrast, Manne takes children seriously.
She reminds us that feminism is a movement
that focuses awareness on the vulnerability
of a particular group, and that, as
such, its ideas have a ‘profound
moral seriousness’. She goes on
to state that children are also vulnerable
and powerless, and that, unlike women,
they are ‘politically mute’.
This voicelessness makes ‘thinking
and writing about children and justice
difficult and our responsibility so
heavy’. Further, on a personal
level, we must recognise ‘our power
over children, and our ability to affect
their lives for good or ill’.
For Manne, how we treat children matters.
She argues that, contrary to the popular
perception of children as eternally
resilient, landing on their feet like
a cat with nine lives, children are
profoundly affected by what happens
to them. She looks closely at attachment
theory, in particular the radical work
of child psychiatrist John Bowlby. Bowlby’s
three-volume work Attachment, Separation
and Loss (1973–82) did what
Manne argues is vital: it got inside
the skin of a child, attempting to see
the world from a child’s point
of view. Bowlby’s findings, although
much maligned in recent years, are now
being corroborated by new research in
neurobiology, specifically research
on infant brain development. Brain development
‘is especially rapid and extensive
in the first year of life … and
is much more vulnerable to environmental
influence than we ever suspected’.
Adverse early environment may affect
later physical and mental health. In
other words, how we treat children really
matters. There are ways we should care
for them, and ways we should not.
Armed with this evidence, Manne tackles
a volatile subject: institutional child
care for toddlers and babies. Manne
examines the damning evidence that,
while some child care in Australia is
high quality, most is not. Experts universally
agree that a ratio of one carer to five
babies constitutes poor quality care,
and yet that is what government regulations
mandate in most states. Most child-care
centres, particularly the increasingly
dominant private centres with a primary
profit motive, have extremely high staff
turnover, preventing children from forming
vital attachments to carers. One survey
of child-care students found that every
single trainee said they would never
place their own child in child care
after what they had seen. Further, Manne
reviews the significant body of research
now demonstrating that, regardless
of quality, early and/or extensive
use of child care presents a risk factor
for aggression and problem behaviour
in children. No matter how high quality
the care, other studies show that interactions
between a paid child-care worker and
a baby do not come close to the quality
of interactions between a loving parent
and child. Manne has the sense to say
what most parents instinctively know:
that from a baby’s point of view,
love matters.
Despite these concerns about children’s
well-being, there is a staggering resistance
to criticism of child care, in academic
and public fora. Manne identifies this
as an example of what Irving Janis has
called Groupthink: the ‘inability
to insert anything outside the assumption
of the dominant group’; the danger
that independent critical thinking will
be silenced. Because institutional child
care has been seen as an indispensable
linchpin in the honour-able feminist
project of emancipating women, some
aca-demics are intractably and ideologically
opposed to criticisms of care. Manne
identifies the trend whereby academics
and even paediatricians would rather
sweep concerns about children’s
well-being under the carpet than make
a parent feel guilty. Despite the glaring
power imbalance, adult vulnerability
seems more important than tiny babies.
Manne makes it clear that, in their
unquestioning sup-port of institutional
care for babies and toddlers, academic
élites are out of step with the
majority of parents. Studies, both here
and overseas, have found overwhelming
parental preference for mother care
at home when children are very young
(in Australia today, a mere five per
cent of babies under one use long daycare;
ninety-five per cent do not, as a direct
consequence of this preference). Given
a choice between publicly funded day
care or time off work and at-home allowances,
most women will choose the latter. Manne
explodes the popular belief that Scandinavian
countries are leading the way by providing
universal day care for babies; they
are in fact leading the way by assisting
women to stay at home in their children’s
early years. Manne points out that ‘if
the trajectory of public policy pushes
families towards institutional child
care and punishes parental care, it
is in clear violation of the principles
of a democratic state’.
Which brings us to Manne’s ultimate
conclusion: ‘an alternative and
humane path through the feminist revo-lution,
which maintains an attentiveness to
the needs of children.’ She argues
for ‘active neutrality’ in
state family policy. That is, active
support for all parents’ preferences,
rather than privileging some over others.
An Australian example was the bipartisan
support for ‘maternal equity policies
— an equal allowance of initially
$3000 but eventually $5000 on the birth
of a child, regardless of whether women
work or not’.
Manne wants to see a society where neither
women nor children are offered substandard
life options. Women should not be forced
to choose between the old dependent,
vulnerable homemaker model, which denied
us the opportunity to use all our skills,
and the new work-centred model, which
denies us the time to nurture our own
children. Children should not be offered
substandard care at the most vulnerable
time of their lives. Manne argues that
three years of parental leave, short
working days, sequencing, career breaks,
at-home allowances and best-practice,
community-based child care would serve
women’s needs to work and children’s
needs for care. Manne emphasises that
these policies should be available to
mothers and fathers, to be used at their
discretion.
This book covers huge ground. It is
the big picture with detail. Many issues
ignored in public discussions of work
and family are vigorously confronted:
the explicit anti-pathy of some work-centred
feminists to motherhood, an antipathy
that other feminists do not share; the
dovetailing of work-centred feminism
with the demands of the new capitalism
in which work has become god; the ‘care
penalty’ that is imposed on women,
but does not have to be imposed, when
they provide the bulk of indispensable
unpaid labour in the community; and
finally, the rise of ‘affluenza’,
that frenzied cycle of earning and spending
that turns some homes from havens to
hells.
Perhaps the singular achievement of
the book is highlighted in its title.
Manne has the courage to write about
motherhood without cynicism. She celebrates
the intense love that a mother has for
her child and that a child has for his
or her mother. More importantly, she
has the courage to persuade us that
we should all treat that precious love
with care.
