Joyce Fegan: Can you afford to be a mother and an employee too?

In a 2015 German study, parents said they found the first two years of parenting more stressful than unemployment or the loss of a partner. 

IN the confines of many mothers’ homes and minds the thinking is: “There is something wrong with me.”

Their perceived failings vary from day to day but they are common across the board.

“My house is a mess. Why can’t I keep on top of things?”

“Why can’t I find the time or energy to exercise?”

“I’m failing at work” or “I’ve let my career go” or “I’m not bringing enough money into this home”.

“I’ve nothing to show for my day.”

All these, while constantly querying as to whether they are being a good enough mother and analysing the quality of the care they are giving to their children.

But the thinking is wrong. Instead of believing “there is something wrong with me”, the thinking should be “there is something wrong with the system”.

That Covid-19 and its resultant restrictions exposed the beyond fragile fault lines of childcare in Ireland is undeniable.

One anecdotal tale tells the story of a busy dad and frontline worker. So difficult was homeschooling, that, on his day off from work as a hospital consultant, he chose to go into work to administer vaccines to colleagues, for free, rather than administer the modh coinníollach to his children.

Parenting is hard and the pandemic really exposed that fact publicly. We talked about the difficulties of being both childminder, parent, cook, teacher, and worker.

Parenting is hard and the pandemic really exposed that fact publicly.

In a 2015 German study, parents said they found the first two years of parenting more stressful than unemployment or the loss of a partner. 

And how researchers arrived at that finding was not by asking parents straight out, but by asking them to rate their happiness over a two-year period and against other life events. 

The point being, how hard they found parenting had to be elicited out of them as they didn’t feel it was socially acceptable to state it outright.

But the issue is not with parenting, it is with the lack of public and State support when it comes to parenting.

Last January, the citizens’ assembly voted, by a majority of 96%, that Ireland should move to a publicly funded model of childcare, meaning that care in the early years and extra care needed around the school-going years would be funded by the State.

Like in Sweden, parents would pay towards the childcare based on their means — the highest fee paid per month for a child in a Swedish creche is €130. And the State would subsidise the rest.

Any profit would return to the State to go into the tax pile or go back into the care system. Staff would be properly remunerated. 

There would be one standard of care for all children, so the most disadvantaged didn’t lose out and parents wouldn’t be forced to choose between care or their career.

So when the Government announced Budget 2022, after 20 months of a big public conversation around care, what was there in terms of a new model of childcare?

Nothing. Absolutely and utterly nothing.

With approximately 300,000 children aged up to four in Ireland, and around two-thirds receiving some form of childcare service, it’s not that there isn’t a question to be answered here.

That’s a lot of people and one presumes those figures will stay steady for decades and decades to come.

The Government had been lobbied for a publicly-funded model of childcare. They have received the recommendations from the citizens’ assembly, and they are surely aware of where we stand globally when it comes to supporting childcare.

Comparatively speaking, Ireland invests relatively little in childcare, with just 0.37% of our GDP going towards it annually and that’s just for children aged three to five. The EU average spend is 0.63% of GDP annually and in Nordic countries that’s 1.01%.

Unicef wants us to get to that 1% too.

So I’m assuming when the calculators were out on the Cabinet table in recent weeks, all of these figures were to hand, as was the figure of €1,000 — the average fee to send one child to creche every month.

Countries such as Colombia, Chile, Latvia, Costa Rica, Estonia, Poland, Mexico, and Turkey spend more of their GDP on early childhood education and care every year than we do. 

So when you worry that your house is a mess or that you could never run 5km, or that you’re not bringing enough cash into your home, it is in this context — the context that women, mothers predominantly, are plugging the chasm in childcare where the State will not.

The citizens’ assembly heard this year that 98% of full-time carers in Ireland are women. In creches, 98% of childcare staff are female and the hourly wage of childcare sector staff is 43.5% below the average national wage.

Their conditions get worse: Almost 80% of childcare workers do not have sick pay, 90% do not have a private pension, and 65% of childcare workers do not have paid maternity leave.

So this isn’t an individual problem to be sucked up in the confines of your own home, this is a public crisis that little is being done to address.

And with so much focus on the early years, so from three to five years of age, what about before that?

When a woman gives birth to a baby, she will receive €245 a week from the State for 26 weeks — about six months. But those free 15 hours a week of Early Childhood Care and Education do not kick in until a child is at least aged three.

So from six months postpartum to when their child is three, what does a parent do for childcare?

You pay on average €1,000 to a creche every month if you have just one child, and if it’s Tusla-registered, you’ll get 50c an hour towards that.

But it’s quite the long stretch from six months to three years, and 50c an hour, or €20 a week doesn’t make a huge dent in that bill.

So what’s a mother to do minister? Only have one child? Leave work because the cost of childcare cancels out her salary or demand that the Government listen to carers and parents and taxpayers and voters and provide a publicly-funded model of childcare?

And if anyone says where will the money come from or who will pay for it, maybe worry about the amount of workers opting out of the workforce, and therefore no longer paying taxes, because they couldn’t afford to be parents and employees too.