More than a third of working mothers want to quit their jobs to look after their children, research suggests.
A further six in ten would like to reduce their hours to spend more time with their young ones, the Government-backed study found.
Less than a fifth said they would choose to increase their hours if there was good affordable childcare available.
The findings fly in the face of Government claims that women would want to go back to work if they could find decent childcare.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Mothers disagree with politicians and child-care activists. How annoying for the child-care activists. I am positively loving it.
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This should make one wonder what the true agenda is for ‘child care activists’ who incessantly lobby the Government and influence Government policies. This should also make one act to help the Government listen to the real care givers and develop policies that will nurture the best care for children.
I made it explicitly clear to my fiance that I want to stay home with the kids once we have them someday. He got a little sensitive because his mother worked when he was a kid, but I pointed out that she was divorced and we won’t be. My mom stayed at home with me for my entire childhood and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I know the majority of mothers would happily sacrifice career for family – but it would be preferable to give them the option.
Besides, this is the real world, and you can’t raise a child on the power of motherly love alone. It takes money too. If women don’t have the option to work, it can mean severe financial hardship for partners of a low-income or unemployed man, and even worse for single mothers.
The idea of options is a good one, Suricou Raven. I am personally only opposed to large state-financed child care plans and not non-parental child care in general, because it eradicates any other options. It does this because it wipes out existing child care structures–no one can compete with the state’s limitless resources (through our tax dollars).
It wipes out choice in another critical way too–in pushing for large government-financed schemes here in Canada, activists go hard on the “education” and “learning”–thereby telling parents this is better, even critical for their children. Parents then use such systems even if they didn’t need to or want to, because they believe they are doing what is right for their children. In some cases, parents have to work precisely because we created the large, state-financed system in the first place. These bureaucracies are expensive! See Quebec for one example.
But options are important, to be sure, in particular if you are a single mother or if you can’t otherwise make ends meet. I hope to be able to be there someday for my kids–as a mother first and whatever job I’m doing second. I figure I’ll always be working outside the home too, at least a little bit (at least that’s what I say now). In any event, I’ll never lobby for a provincial system–because of the unintended consequences. If those systems could deliver the blue sky they promise, there would never be any reason to oppose them. It’s quite clear that they can’t.