COMMUNITY life has, since the industrial revolution, been dominated in Great Britain by the demands of the economic system to the virtual exclusion of other social considerations. Child rearing, home and family care have continued to play an essential part in meeting the needs of individuals. But the economic system has registered only the costs of breakdown and remedial actions. In the same way as economists have only recently, and marginally, come to account the destruction of the environment and the exhaustion of the earth's scarce resources, the development of affective and social skills through traditional forms of home and family care has been taken for granted and subtly devalued.
Males and feminists alike have, for their different reasons, combined to underplay and undermine the significance of family care in introducing new members to the social community of human beings. The strength of the backlash against this erosion of family life can be seen in the vigour of the growth in support for fundamentalist religions. Beyond those narrow confines, home care, child care and the traditional skills of mothering have been denigrated and debased. Parenting and child care have been demoted to a spare time activity outside working hours, to be delegated wherever possible to low paid substitutes. In this way, traditionally male concern with production of statistically verifiable material wealth has been accepted as the sole significant form of human activity. The need for love, care and affection is appreciated only at the point of personal breakdown, when expensive specialists are consulted.
Traditionally feminine concerns have so far eluded the androcentric comprehension which dominates all forms of academic and educational structures in society. The psychologists — and there have been many of them, and of both sexes — who record the infant's ambivalence towards its mother could, perhaps, with more accuracy be said to be recording the results of the untypical mother's ambivalence towards her child. Mothering in human beings is a socially sensitive activity, and Western society has, since the onset of the industrial revolution, placed the rearing of children under peculiar constraints.
Taking the lead from classical economists, backed up by cynical psychologists, we in the West have come to doubt the sincerity of those who offer love and affection. The ideal role model of the tender and caring mother — or father — has been replaced by the young, fit, healthy, role-playing, 25 year old male, in economic employment and without ties or responsibilities. By contrast, the woman who cares, be it for an elderly relative, a child — her own, or that of another who has suffered mental or physical abuse,— or her sick or disabled husband, child or parent, is designated a person of low status, her needs ignored in terms of community support, and her economic independence removed from any guarantees. Following the industrial revolution, family life has come to be curiously dependent upon wage earning, that is, upon the economic rewards to labour as a factor of production.
The reward given to labour bears no relationship whatsoever to the economic needs of the family. Further, it takes no account of the work involved in household tasks, work which recent International Labour Office estimates show consumes at least as many working hours as are spent in paid employment. This supportive work is acknowledged to be essential in servicing the workers, that is, in attending to their essential needs for food, clothing, shelter and leisure. The very existence of labour, an essential factor of production in economic terms, is dependent upon the satisfaction of those needs. Housework is, however, excluded from economic calculations in the same way as nature's gifts are assumed to be free, simply because they do not occur as a result of financial considerations. A mother does not — normally — wait to be paid to look after her baby. Yet it is this very absence of economic motivation which demotes an activity in Western eyes. 'If a job is worth doing, it is worth being paid to do it', is the current rule of thumb. As a result, mothering and caring generally are classed as menial tasks, to be delegated to others wherever possible for a financial consideration.
It is, however, becoming clear [in 1988] that child-rearing practices based on the economic needs of the parents are giving grounds for concern. Parents return from work to tackle household and child care responsibilities in their 'spare' time, often many miles away from otherwise supportive grandparents. In attempting to side-step the demands of children for attention and affection, busy parents offer the passive and undemanding viewing of television rather than embark upon traditional forms of interactive play, talking and reading together. The significance of the incalculable numbers of hours of shared activity of children and adults spent in the recounting of nursery rhymes, tales and games combined with routine household tasks, has been seriously undervalued. These activities, essential in the formation of self-esteem and self awareness, have fallen into disuse in many families. So, too, have forms of children's free peer group play in streets and open spaces near to home. Traffic and other modern dangers have eroded ancient childhood rights, restricting in an unprecedented way children's freedom to develop a sense of personal awareness, place and community. The middle-aged and elderly of today [1988], from even the most inner city areas, can recall childhood excursions to open countryside and areas of woodland in the company of siblings and friends, and an ease of access to shops and houses of relatives in nearby streets which is rarely possible today. The resultant frustration and alienation demonstrated in adolescent behaviour stems directly from this absence of an early sense of belonging to family and to community.
Human beings are more than mere units of labour, cogs in the economic production machine. Material wealth is very limited as a means for satisfying human wants. Labour saving devices have not, according to recent studies, cut down the number of hours devoted to housework. They have, in fact, increased the total number of hours of work in the home, as expectations have been raised and the machines themselves require attention. Further, the time spent earning money to pay for the machines has increased, as have other associated expenses. Rudolph Bahro, the West German 'Green', has presented a vivid image in commenting that 'today we spend ten times as much energy for a worker to be able to sit in front of the TV in the evenings with his bottle of beer as we needed in the eighteenth century for Schiller to create his life's work'.
The ability of the earth to tolerate the ever expanding demands of human beings for continued economic growth is being seriously brought into question in terms of the exhaustion of the finite resources of the earth, and the as yet only partially understood effects of the pollution of the land, seas and atmosphere. It may be time to look more seriously at the development of the human intellect and the human community, as a substitute for the continued demand for material wealth. In reality, consumer commodities have never been more than a means to an end, as King Midas found out so long ago.
Despite the wisdom of the ancients, material wealth remains the predominant pre-occupation of our time. Few would fail to wince at the idea of handing a highly priced Ming vase to a person with no conception of its value, who might well drop it, or throw it in the dustbin. Yet many a human infant's life chances are far less well protected than those of a Ming vase. Attempts are made to patch up some of the most disastrous mistakes in child care, and the expensive services of highly-trained specialists may be lavished upon children whose lives have been shattered by parental neglect, physical, mental or sexual abuse. But beyond this largely futile gesture, society on the whole places a low value on child care and spends few resources in the preparation of, and support for, adults in their responsibilities as parents. If anything, the economic system has quietly encroached upon and undermined the status and skills of those who do attempt to care.
Some would, however, accept that each human infant is indeed more precious than the most expensive vase on earth. When one considers that fifty per cent of a child's intellectual potential is developed before the age of five years, and that the foundations are laid in those early years for his or her artistic and emotional life, the lack of training and support in parenthood is astonishing. This deprivation applies not only in inner city areas, where temporary accommodation and a background of unsettled family life has been inherited by successive generations of parents since the early days of the industrial revolution. Parents in the affluent professional classes enter parenthood in a haze of equal ignorance, ignorance which they themselves would consider horrific in a fellow professional embarking upon a professional task. With smaller families, and geographic mobility which has split the extended family, it is not at all uncommon for a couple's own baby to be the very first they have ever held in their hands, and for their knowledge of the needs of a toddler or young child to be virtually non-existent.
So bemused have we become with the significance of economic growth that we fail even to consider the allocation of resources to the care and nurture of infants and young children. In a haphazard way families have little option but to choose between a series of unsatisfactory strategies in deciding their child care methods. Where both parents wish to remain in economic employment, the parents may decide to pay for the child to be cared for by a non-family member during working hours. The primary duty of this stranger, brought into the child's life on a temporary basis, is to oversee the physical welfare of the child. The relationship between the family and the stranger will cease when their services are no longer required, even where a strong bond may have developed between the child and the carer.
If, on the other hand, parents decide that their child needs continuity of care and affection, and that home and family should weigh more heavily than purely financial considerations, the family faces a further series of unexpected hurdles.
There is considerable pressure upon women in particular to consider that child care is no more than a matter of providing for the physical comfort of an infant up to the age of five years. Beyond that age it is considered that children are off the parents' hands, as they enter formal schooling, and embark on the processes of training to themselves become units of labour in the economic machine. With the trend towards smaller families, women are encouraged to think that parenting is no more than a minor hiccup in the working life of an adult, taking up a mere 3% of a normal working life. Nothing could be further from the truth. A child is a lifetime's commitment, altering the relationships between the parents, grandparents, siblings, not to mention the child itself, within the family and the community. A child forms a unique link between present and future generations. Further, a child requires a sense of place and personal identity if it is to develop into a mature and responsible adult, willing and able to work with others for the good of the community, and capable of actions beyond the narrowest pursuit of adolescent self-interest.
Perhaps it is time to look again at the fragmentation of family and community life which has resulted from the pursuit of pure materialism, and to consider forms of training for child care and design of communities based on more truly human, as opposed to economic, values. Women who have remained in the home and in the community may well prove to be a most valuable, and hitherto undervalued, source of knowledge and associated with child care and homemaking. There is, however, increasing economic pressure militating against the dissemination of these traditional skills. It may be necessary to mount a new conservation campaign to prevent the total extinction of human values in Western society.
"The Midas Touch" by Frances Hutchinson was first published in Contemporary Review, Vol. 253 No. 1471. August 1988, pp80-83.
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