Childcare is a men’s issue too
Labour’s election pledge to increase free childcare by increasing the bank levy has proved an important talking point with mums since I became the new shadow minister for children and families. But I am keen to bring dads fully into the childcare equation too. Here is why.
Grayson Perry’s recent essay in the New Statesman concerned ‘default man’. All about identity, Perry turns the tables on the ‘white, middle-class, heterosexual men’ that the rest of us could perhaps be said to define ourselves against. As a woman in politics, I am still only the 304th woman member of parliament elected to the House of Commons. I am the second-ever Alison.
‘Default man’ still holds the keys to the kingdom. As Perry writes, ‘They dominate the upper echelons of our society, imposing, unconsciously or otherwise, their values and preferences on the rest of the population. With their colourful textile phalluses hanging round their necks, they make up an overwhelming majority in government, in boardrooms and also in the media.’ Though perhaps the momentum has been moving against ‘default man’, his hand is still very much on the tiller.
Still, if – as Perry argues – ‘default man’ is still very powerful in British society, there is one respect in which men are left out and excluded. Childcare is still seen too often as a ‘women’s issue’. Despite the fact that, for example, over 60 per cent of fathers take up their right to paid paternity leave, the political discussion has not moved on far enough. In fact, I think while in reality men are often concerned with childcare choices, and as much a part of the discussion as women are, there are few representations of this family reality in our debates.
We let this stereotyping persist at our risk. Just like the lazy assumption that all women have an inbuilt interest in small children, dads are too often overlooked. So in taking up my new role, I am keen to highlight issues faced by dads and mums who want to play a full role in parenting, while also working hard for their family, and to sustain our economy. It need not be ‘either-or’, and our childcare pledge is for everybody.
And a word from the press lobby too. Often thought of as an unreconstructed, somewhat traditionalist, environment, journalist James Miller of the Sunday Post has recently reshaped his working week to look after his four-year-old. He says there is a view from some that, ‘going part-time … somehow amounted to a lack of ambition’ and suggests that, ‘the way to change these subtle behavioural cues is to normalise men going part-time’. This surely must be part of the answer: to give women and men a level base from which to make choices.
It is obvious that men as well as women have a lot to gain from Labour’s priorities in this area. More women in work will help us improve the nation’s finances, and build in future prosperity as we grow a more skilled workforce. But there is more to it than this. A childcare debate that ceases to pigeonhole, or make assumptions about who does what, gives everyone the chance to make the choices that are right for them. Real choices mean more empowered families.
I will be listening to what all parents think over the next few months. And making sure that next year’s Labour government starts work right away, not only on reforming the broken markets in childcare, but changing the terms of debate that hold us all back.
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Alison McGovern MP is shadow minister for children and families
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Only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.
This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on.
If fathers matter, then they must face up to their responsibilities, with every assistance, including censure where necessary, from the wider society, including when it acts politically as the State.
A legal presumption of equal parenting. Restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers. Restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father.
Repeal of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed.
And paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child was 18 or left school, thereby reasserting paternal authority, and thus requiring paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence.
Of course a new baby needs her mother. But a 15-year-old might very well need her father, and that bit of paternity leave that he has been owed these last 15 years.
That authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. That basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need.
Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.
Moreover, paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars. Especially, though not exclusively, since those sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm.
Think of those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children.
You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You cannot do both.