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Mother and baby at laptop in home office
'To the Mail and Telegraph, working mums are either neglectful career obsessives, lazy benefit scroungers, or rich idle yummy mummies.' Photograph: Alamy
'To the Mail and Telegraph, working mums are either neglectful career obsessives, lazy benefit scroungers, or rich idle yummy mummies.' Photograph: Alamy

Working mothers are good for children – but the guilt trips will keep coming

This article is more than 8 years old
Polly Toynbee
The rightwing media made its mind up about working mothers long ago. Don’t expect a groundbreaking Harvard study to change it

Working mothers are good for their children, says a Harvard Business School study. Data from 24 countries suggests that the daughters of working mothers have better careers, higher pay and more equal relationships than those whose mothers stayed at home. What’s more, their sons thrive too and grow up to be better men, more involved at home, taking more time caring for their own family than men who grew up cosseted by stay-at-home mothers.

Will this at last relieve the guilt and anxiety working women feel? Probably not a lot, since combining work and children is so unbearably fraught for so many mothers, and society still so badly adapted. I did it, and now I relive it by seeing my daughters do it – though I also remember them when small and in a bad mood crossly muttering that they’d stay at home for their children: all children know how to play on a working mother’s guilt.

Childcare is phenomenally expensive. Even when the government increases it to a free 30 hours for three and four year-olds, the crises in holidays, half terms, inset days, polling days or child sickness days cause perpetual panics. School plays, school trips, parent meetings – all the things that should be pleasures are too often problems. Labour had started creating extended schools with breakfast and after-school clubs – support for the deprived and vital childcare provision for working mothers – but many have closed. The Harvard report finds the UK and US harsher than the rest of the EU on working conditions for mothers.

Will this finally lay to rest the barrage of assaults on working mothers from the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph? Of course not. For them, women are always in the wrong. Either they are career obsessives who neglect their children to pursue ambition, or if they stay at home they’re either lazy benefit scroungers or rich, idle yummy mummies leaving children with nannies while they take spa days. Just check the press archives and see the stream of guilt-inducing headlines suggesting working mothers do irreparable damage to their children. “Stay-at-home mothers ‘have the most worthwhile lives’”, reports the Telegraph. “Decline of the stay-at-home mother” bemoans the Mail, plus this “Here’s absolute proof mothers are better off staying at home” from their columnist Peter Hitchens. He writes, “One ‘family-friendly’ policy is taxpayer subsidies for the network of day orphanages where abandoned children are detained without trial for long hours while their mothers are chained to desks miles away.” Don’t expect the Mail and Telegraph yearning for a return to a fantasy 1950s to end any time soon.

What would it take to send mothers home? A housing market everyone could afford where one average wage would cover the rent or mortgage without the family starving. Fathers’ average pay would need to rise by about 75% to compensate. If not, tax credits and benefits for stay-at-home mothers would need to rise by about that sum – but the government is axing them. Divorce would be banned – as one in three mothers will at some point find themselves separated and left as the main breadwinner for their children. The new marriage tax allowance is supposed to provide the necessary marital glue – but at £212 a year, that’s magical policymaking. Stay-at-home mothers who have to return to work once they’ve lost their career status find nothing but low-paid, low-status, zero-hours, or mock self-employed agency jobs await – at the beck and call of employers, impossible to mould around school-gate times. Here’s the irony: when universal credit comes in, it will be far harder for women to work, as the family credits will fall for every pound they earn. Where’s the sense in that?

The Mail didn’t cover this groundbreaking Harvard report. Instead they ran this story: “Outdazzled by our daughters! Three mothers candidly talk about their ‘looks fading’ as their teenage girls bloom”.

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