Working mothers - Two jobs may undermine family life

THE label “working mother” must be one of the most under-powered and patronising descriptions current today. It leaves the delusional room to imagine that there might be another kind.

Motherhood, and to a lesser degree fatherhood, presents an unavoidable litany of one chore after another for the great majority of women.

That list is greatly extended if both parents “work outside the home” and is usually stretched to its very limit for women whose lives are divided between family and career. And no matter how we give lip-service to that fabled species — New Man — it is nearly always the women who do the heavy lifting in this situation.

We all see the exhausted women in every office, shop and place of work across the country; torn between wanting to be a successful, professional and admired colleague and the absolute need to get to the creche before the child minder starts to fret and moan about you “being late again”.

This has been a shrill battleground for years, informed by bias of all sorts. The issue has, in the majority of instances, been determined by economic needs and sometimes clouded by economic aspirations.

Some feminists — and others — believe that a woman has an absolute right to a life-long career even if they become a mother and insist that employers and the state have a role to play in making that possible.

A small number of women are supported in their careers by partners who are happy to stay at home and accept all of the domestic responsibility that confers. Good for them.

However, you can wrap it up any way you like and insist on any right you imagine is yours, but the reality is that far too many parents are deeply unhappy that they both have to work and that their children spend too long in the care of paid strangers. Their unhappiness will not be eased by a weekend conference at UCC where their dilemma will be discussed.

If, at the end of the day they had the time or the energy to read about it, they will be told that parental childcare is the best option for children “at least for under threes”. As if they didn’t know.

And, if the guilt didn’t kick in after that, try this “many women would prefer to care for their children themselves because it is the care which matches childrens’ needs best, but also because there is an immense and immeasurable return from motherhood”.

So guilt joins exhaustion and makes life even more difficult. Why has all of this happened? It’s a relatively recent development. The number of women in the work-force has more than doubled in the last 15 years.

Many working families believe that putting children in paid care does not hinder them in any way. Believing anything else is just too awful to accept. It means that you’re putting your boss’s needs before your child’s.

The reality is that we just don’t know because we are at a very early stage of this social development.

What we do know is that far too many people are far too concerned at being caught in this bind and that the social and economic imperatives of the day offer little or no chance of a new way of doing things.

There is no need to start comparing our childcare arrangements and costs with developed countries, it would be just add to the fretting, but there is a need to get this issue closer to the top of our political agenda.

It is making too many people feel bad about themselves, undermining too many relationships and putting burdens where there should be supports.