Is childcare good for children?

Posted: 5 April 2013

The Australian Federal Government recently announced that it will introduce a package of new measures to provide more flexible and accessible childcare to better meet the needs of what it calls “modern families”. The $11 million trials will include overnight and weekend care for the children of shift workers, extended weekday hours and more out of school hours care to “remove the barriers to workforce participation”. The media release, issued by the Minister for Childcare, was seasoned with references to how the trial responds to the needs of families and helps parents in the “work/family juggle”. The Minister spoke about the way in which the significant growth in women’s workforce participation in recent decades had created extra demand for childcare.

And demand it has created. There are around 6500 childcare centres in Australia offering long day care (from early morning to early evening) and the number of centres is increasing by about 250 centres per year. That of course means the number of clients are on the rise with 1.9 million children in 2011 attending one or more types of childcare, which was just over half of Australian children aged 12 or younger.

Without a doubt childcare is seen as an acceptable and even a socially responsible path. Reports are seen in the media from time-to-time extolling the value that quality childcare can bring in the well being of children. The studies seem to indicate that the more time childcare staff spend being actively engaged with the children, the better their social and emotional development. One expert on child development was quoted as saying the highest quality childcare is provided in those centres where the children are “loved to bits”. What? Have we reached such a place where the most obvious data seems to surprise us? The fact that children need to be loved and given attention is the most basic piece of human programming yet it is as if we are discovering it afresh.

What is most discouraging though is that in all the talk of childcare – from government ministers to journalists to university academics – no one seems to be able (or willing) to annunciate the elephant in the room. And that elephant is that children fare best within the care of their parents, and in most circumstances that primary care is usually given through the mother. Yet instead of highlighting the essential nature of parents in the direct raising of their children, the federal government assigns a special minister to childcare and proceeds to undertake trials that will essentially allow parents to be more absent from their children than ever before.

Allow me to say that I am not criticising those who work in childcare, the families who opt to use childcare or mothers who work. What I want to point out is the strange disconnect that seems exists. Too many people seem very intent on making us all feel good about childcare and as far as I can see the reason for this is simply to keep women in workforce participation. Without a doubt our society needs women in various positions of employ meaning that there will be times when the children of these mothers will need to be looked after, hence the genuine need for childcare. But with half of Australian children in some form of regular childcare one can’t help but wonder if we have inverted our priorities as a nation.

Childcare is not the sign of a healthy nation. If all the mothers of Australia went to work tomorrow that would not be an asset. Any nation is best served by having young children with their parents. The government boasts about its investment of $23.1 billion into early childhood education and care, but where is the allocation to assist mothers to stay at home to be with their children? A mother may opt to work and that is her prerogative but too many find themselves having to work to pay the bills. Too many mothers receive subliminal messages that their value and worth is to be found in paid employment. This is an unfortunate lie. Children need their mothers, not part time, but full time. A healthy nation needs its mothers being mothers. We speak of childcare as if it is normal to take a toddler and leave them in the care of strangers (however genuine and well trained they might be) in their most formative years. A nation that is overly proud of its achievements in burgeoning childcare numbers has truly missed the point.

Comments are closed.

No food…but plenty of condoms

Posted: 25 July 2012

I opened the newspaper this week to read the headline that Australia will be doubling an aspect of its foreign aid to $50 million to assist the poor women of the world. What a wonderful idea. Perhaps the aid will be going towards vital medication to women in Sub-Saharan Africa; perhaps food and vitamins to women in South Asia; or perhaps it will pay for education and training in more effective farming methods? No. The money will go completely towards ‘family planning’. And not just our $50 million, add to that half a billion dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a total amount from worldwide governments and the private sector of $2.6 billion. This amount was committed during the recently held family planning summit in London. So that is $2.6 billion for condoms, contraceptive pills and IUDs (small devices placed in the uterus which release a chemical to prevent pregnancy). Add to this an army of frontline health workers to go into these far flung places and educate women about how to best stop having children. This is family planning that has as its aim the destruction of the family.

The money will go to sustain the current contraceptive use by 260 million women in 69 of the world’s poorest nations. It will further ‘help’ another 222 million women who want to use contraception but do not have access to it. I wonder who spoke to these 222 million women? It is no secret that much foreign aid has for years been dependent on women signing up to family planning programs. If you have five hungry children and your next ration pack is dependent on having a device stuck up your uterus, it may not leave a great deal of choice. As we all know a mother will sacrifice everything for her children, and in this case her very dignity as a woman. Too often it is truckloads of contraceptives that make it across war-torn and famine-ridden borders instead of truckloads of food, water and medicines.

A number of the reports from the family planning summit speak about the challenges faced in implementing family planning programs including places where contraception is seen as unacceptable due to culture or religion. Does that mean that the Atheistic West with all its money and superiority is going to charge on into nations and, one family at a time, cut down the pillars of culture and faith that make these people who they are? The Western world has so enthusiastically embraced contraception that many nations in Europe are no longer even replacing their own population. The immigration we so heavily rely on in Australia is coming from the very nations whose populations we want to destroy.

At the heart of all this is a loss of seeing fertility as a good. The very essence of a woman is that she can bear new life. Some women may never be able to conceive through no fault of their own but that is very different to taking the greatest aspect of femininity and killing it with a cocktail of chemicals. Ironically in the 21st century we are very conscious of what we eat, yet millions upon millions of women continuously ingest harmful chemicals to stop what is a perfectly normal process. Contraception is the only ‘medication’ given to someone who is completely healthy to stop them being completely healthy. Instead of educating women (and men) about how their bodies work we create chemicals to override them. Just last month another two lawsuits were filed against one of the largest manufacturers of the IUD. The incident involved the IUD device migrating from the location where it was implanted so that the women were forced to undergo a hysterectomy and now suffer ongoing pain and permanent injury.

The notion of ‘family planning’ that is promoted by wealthy companies such as Marie Stopes International and Planned Parenthood (the largest providers of abortion in the world) has infected completely the governments of the secular western world. The mentality has also spread to most international aid organisations that purport to be pro child. (Think carefully next time you get bowled up in a shopping centre and asked to sponsor children in Africa).

Having sacrificed our own women and daughters to the god of sterility we now seek to go into the bodies of women and girls in developing nations, and treating them like nothing better than cattle, inject them with drugs that ‘we know’ will be for their own good. The situation is an international disgrace.

Comments are closed.

Why Eat at the Dinner Table?

Posted: 24 June 2012

Where did your family eat dinner last night? In front of the TV? In the car on the way to sport? At McDonalds? At the dinner table? A survey taken a few years ago in the US, Canada and Britain, found that about a quarter of adults with children under the age of 18 ate dinner together at home seven nights a week. Another quarter said they ate together three or fewer nights a week. I am going to surmise that Australian households would not be too far off those figures.

Once upon a time (not that long ago) we know that the situation was different. Each night the dining table would be set with a simple cloth and serviettes, the cutlery and crockery would be laid out and as ‘dinner time’ neared an increasing number of hungry mouths would appear with the question, “what’s for dinner”?

What accounts for this decline in families eating together today though? The data seems to point to two main issues: Overworked parents and overscheduled children. When mum and dad get home in the evening they are soon in the car again to whisk the children off to sport, music, tutoring, church activities and a host of other events.

This nightly ritual around the dinner table however is both vital and fruitful: it is what anchors a family together. Sure, the conversation is not always profound and children argue and fidget. And sometimes the deepest and most meaningful times in a family are not at the table at all. However, even with all that in mind there is something unique about the time a family spends around the dinner table eating a meal together.

The security of the dinner table is a central place for the family to return to whether the times are joy filled, sorrowful or somewhere in between. It is the place where the family builds an identity. Stories are passed down, jokes exchanged and the wider world is examined through the lens of the family’s values. Children pick up vocabulary and a sense of how conversation is structured. They learn good manners and proper etiquette, something that will set them up for life. Meal time is often the time that families pray together. Dinner time is not ‘parent time’ or ‘children time’ but it is truly ‘family time’. Coming back daily to the same place helps instill familiarly. When a family closes their front door to world each night and sits down together around the table, they are subliminally stating, ‘this is what is most important to us; this is where we truly exist.’

Striving for regular family meals is not mere idealism. Experts in adolescent development are the ones who are saying that the daily investment in family time pays the largest dividends. Studies show that the more families eat together, the less likely the children are to smoke, drink, take drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables and learn how to socialise. One anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey stated, “If it were just about food, we would squirt it into their mouth with a tube. A meal is about civilising children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture”. You might recall the riots in England in 2011, to what extent would that have happened if families were at home having dinner? Especially in an era when divorce and family breakdown are at such high levels, the need becomes all the more urgent for children and parents to set down together and get to know each other once again.

There is no one-size-fits-all for families in regards meal times but it might be of benefit to really take a hard look at your family routine. Is it overbooked? Are you tired and frantic? Will your children be better off with more activities in their week? Why not cut back on a few activities and spend some unstructured time with your family? Start by planning some stay at home family dinners together. Set the table, turn off the TV and enjoy a meal together. Just a thought.

Comments are closed.

University and Women: A Fair Combination?

Posted: 21 March 2012

A new university year has just begun and thousands of fresh faces are sitting in lecture halls being prepared to one day step into the world and make their mark in their chosen career path. The necessity of the journey through university and into a well paid career is almost an unspoken law. Yet I wonder if we are placing young people, especially young women, into what will one day be a difficult position that compromises their potential for genuine happiness.

From their earliest years children hear the mantra that men and women are equal, and while they are certainly equal in dignity they are not equal in ability. I do not mean that one sex has more ability than the other; I mean that each sex has a different ability, each sex has different strengths. The complementarity of the sexes is the reason that the natural family of father, mother and children is the best model; it is far better to have a loving father and a loving mother than to have two loving mothers or two loving fathers. However preferring to ignore all evidence to the contrary and in the push to describe gender as no more than a social construct, society tells us that men and women must achieve the same level in all things. If men can drive a tractor, women must be able to drive a tractor; if men can run a corporation, women must be able to run a corporation. It seems to focus though on women being able to achieve in traditionally male roles, not the other way around.

And so with this as the foundation, young women, believing that their happiness is to be found in a successful career path, dedicate some of the best years of their lives to studying law, business and economics. They do well (which is no surprise) and they move out into the workforce with a massive potential to achieve anything they set their sights on.

But then as they begin to make real progress in their field, a new challenge approaches…the call to marriage and family. These very talented women were told to make something of themselves through their chosen career path; they have sacrificed and worked as hard, if not harder, than their male counterparts. In all the talk about being whatever you want to be, no one made much mention of the distinct and unique role of motherhood. Certainly these women sense the importance of raising their children and being a good wife and mother, but they have also invested all their energy (and a great deal of their money) becoming highly educated and a genuine asset to their particular industry.

One recent article attempted to explain why it was that so few women were making it into senior executive positions. With the average career spanning thirty or so years, the article found that “five years of ‘career interruption’ due to family responsibilities [i.e. having children] should hardly be a disqualifying penalty”. And this idea demonstrates the actual problem; the task of full time mothering can supposedly be over within a few short years allowing the woman to get back to her career with minimal disruption.

There will be some that will disagree with me citing themselves or women they know as fine examples of balancing a successful career and a happy family all at the same time. My point however is not to make a statement about any particular situation but rather to question the wisdom of a society that pushes its women into an academic and career driven world when at some point many will be asked to make a choice to leave it or attempt some sort of balancing act between raising a family and raising the company profit margin.

While true feminism seeks to uphold the dignity of women and their particular gifts, our secular Western society parades around a false feminism. It is one that makes little girls think they have to be better than boys and women think they need to achieve in all the same fields as men. The truth is that men are not women and women are not men. A successful life is not necessarily one that ‘juggles’ between family and career. Motherhood is a respectable and vital role that should not be seen as an afterthought that can automatically attach itself onto a career. Society would do well to remind its young women of bigger realities rather than pushing them to be like men in all that they do.

Comments are closed.

How well do you know your Family?

Posted: 11 January 2012

Welcome to 2012! Did you have a restful break from work…or did you have a break at all? Did you know that at the end of 2011, Australian workers have stockpiled 129.6 million days of annual leave! It matches the recent conversation I had with a man who admitted that he had not taken annual leave for three years even though he has a young family. His response as to why, was that he liked being at work and would not know what to do otherwise (I guess that if one had not taken a break for that long, one may forget what to do with the time).

This does make me wonder though, why we are not taking breaks. It is good that we like our work but why are we not going home? Could it be that it becomes easier to be at work than to engage with the family?

In our homes and amongst our families we also have work that must be done and it is not mowing the lawn or tidying the house. The real work is the work of building up a community, a place where love is received by each member of the family and a place where each member is able to give love.

At the end of last year I spent one month away leading a residential course for twenty young adults from around Australia. During the month the participants receive many different aspects of formation but apart from everything what makes the event so transformative is the strong community that is formed. These young people that begin as strangers end up as lifelong friends and not only because they lived together for a month, but because they shared their lives at a deep level, their joys and their weaknesses, their hopes and their fears. So close does the group become that by the end it is a challenge for them to settle back into home with their own families. However, if our families were as strong as they should be that month would not seem so extraordinary. In this course there is no TV, no phones, no internet, no iPods and at each meal we eat together. In free time we play cards, board games and talk to one another. We have events in which each person publically honours someone else in the community. Much planning goes into this course but everything that is done there should be and can be done in the family; it is the work of a family.

Many of us may be living with our family under the one roof, but that does not mean we know anyone in our family. Each time I travel on the train there are people sitting and reading magazines about the latest celebrity news. I often wonder if they would score higher in a quiz about a celebrity or in a quiz about someone in their own family. How would you score in a quiz about the members of your family?

Just as one can be married but not really have a marriage, one can be in a family but not really have a family. If our family life only exists by default because we live in the same house then perhaps this New Year is the time to address the situation. And the solution is not complicated. It begins by opening up channels in when we have opportunities to share in one another’s lives. That is why the dinner table should is the most crucial piece of furniture in the house. The dinner table is the place where daily lives are shared, and not necessarily the major events but more importantly the minor ones, the details that only a family really have an interest in. For when we have a place to share our insignificant stories we have room to share the significant crossroads of life. Once the family is secure around the table it begins to make sense to share weekends and holidays together.

When we feel we belong to a family then our weekends and annual leave becomes valuable time to spend not just with the family but as a family, not doing but being. The work of building up the family then takes on its own joys that put the paid work we do during business hours into perspective. We begin to see that work exists for us; we do not exist for work. So if you are the owner of some of those 129.6 million days of annual leave perhaps give some thought to trading them in for time with your family in the coming year.

Comments are closed.

Abortion…And The Pain in Our Society

Posted: 16 October 2011

Abortion is one of those topics that make people really, really uncomfortable. Nothing destroys the conversation at a pleasant weekend barbeque more instantly than talk of the morality of abortion. A couple of incidences recently made me consider about why it might be that the topic is so divisively painful and I thought they were worth sharing.

If you approach a train station on a weekday afternoon, chances are you will have a complimentary copy of the MX newspaper flung into your hands. There are regularly articles in the MX commenting on moral/ethical issues so I often text in a couple of sentences for the feedback pages. A while ago I sent in a comment regarding a story they ran about hundreds of mothers in India giving their baby girls sex change operations to make them males. I questioned which was worse, the goings on in India, or, the 90,000 annual abortions taking place in Australia. The message was published and expectedly attracted a barrage of messages both for and against abortion. To the credit of the newspaper they published messages on both sides for several days and in those days there was a definite progression of thought. Initially there were angry messages that the ‘foetus’ is not a human life, following that there were messages from others outlining how science unequivocally states that the unborn baby is indeed human. And lastly there were messages which stated that even if the unborn baby was ‘human’ it was certainly not a ‘person’. In reading the messages what was evident struck me was the length people would go to justify the notion that abortion could somehow be acceptable.

The second incident was also a few months ago when the director of Family Life International Australia, Paul, was taking calls on a popular talkback station about the work they do in praying and offering material support outside abortion clinics. One woman named Sarah, called in to speak to him. She was obviously angry at what was being said and she explained that she was now a mother of three children but before she was married she fell pregnant and was simply “not ready to be a mother”. As part of his response, Paul pointed out to Sarah that actually she became a mother with that first pregnancy and that she was in fact the mother of four children. It was obvious that with those words Paul had struck a chord Sarah and Sarah’s voice because audibly upset as she rejected the notion that she was the mother of an aborted child.

What became obvious in both those incidences was how raw the issue is in our society and how much people will do what they can to block out the reality. It truly is the unspoken about elephant in the room. Even though there is a lack of consistent data around abortions numbers it is estimated that just since 1994, there have been close to 1.3 million abortions in Australia. This means there is on average one aborted baby for every three babies born.

What that figure of 1.3 million equals is a lot of hurt in our society, it equals a whole lot of people who have been touched by an abortion. That is a lot of mothers (and a lot of fathers) who may be feeling a whole lot of sorrow, guilt and hurt. Is it little wonder then that so many people in society need to (indeed have to) for their own mental well being, deny that abortion is actually the death of a young human life? Can you imagine if 1.3 million mothers interiorised that the foetus they aborted yesterday, last month or 40 years ago was a human life with a beating heart, active brain and living soul? The grief in the streets would be unbearable. Australia’s total war dead is around 100,000 yet every year we lose close to that many Australians through abortion. I can’t help but wonder how many of 12 million anti-depressant scripts written each year in Australia are linked somehow to this silent tragedy.

The point is that condemnation of the objective act of abortion must always be swiftly followed by the mention of the subjective healing that is possible and available for those who have had an abortion. Abortion will always be wrong – the taking of an innocent human life can never be justified – but sadly, the baby is not the only life that is affected. Thankfully there are groups such as Rachel’s Vineyard (www.rachelsvineyard.org.au) which offer healing for the many hurting men and women who have been touched by abortion and suffer in some way with what is now referred to as post-abortion syndrome. We can only hope that those who suffer will seek out and undertake the necessary healing for their own well being and future happiness.

Comments are closed.

Greatest Gift for Children is Brothers and Sisters

Posted: 23 September 2011

Why is it that everyone does what everyone else does? Yes, we all carry iPhones and drink Coca Cola but what I find most intriguing is why everyone stops at two children? Why is Mum, Dad, Johnny and Jenny considered the perfect sized family in advertising and in reality? It is no great revelation to note that the current total fertility rate in Australia is around 1.9 children per woman compared to the 3.4 children that was the case only fifty years ago.

We are not even replacing ourselves anymore.

The most obvious reason for this significant drop would have to be the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1960. The main function of ‘the pill’ is to disturb a woman’s normal cycle of fertility by confusing her body into thinking it is pregnant thus suppressing ovulation. (If ovulation does occur the pill’s second line of defence is to make the mother’s womb inhospitable to the newly created embryo and the little guy is eventually flushed out, most often without anyone knowing).

However, the pill’s less obvious but more subtle effect has really been to fundamentally change the way that husbands and wives look at themselves, their sexuality and their families. The pill subliminally causes us to separate love-making from child-making and when that happens human beings can begin to see love as less to do with the other and more to do with the self. One doesn’t have to look far to see an advertisement that will make it clear who the most important person in the world is (if you are not sure, it is you).

We are told that the less inconvenience we live with the better our lives will be but is that really true?

I am actually writing this on an airplane to London to go to a conference. And can I say that this trip has caused me a fair bit on ‘inconvenience’, I had to rearrange my schedule while I am away, I had to pack a bag (I hate packing) and I had to get up at 5am this morning to get to the airport at 6.30am so I could sit around for three hours waiting to fly out.

However, I would have been labeled a fool if I declined the trip so I did not have to pack a bag. Why? Because the greater good of travelling to a new place and encountering new people is an obvious good. So I can’t help but wonder why we view children differently? Are not the difficulties of raising children outweighed by a new life? Every child in the world is a source of joy and the greatest gift we can receive. Children are the visible sign of the love of a couple, so why stop the sign of our love at only a couple of children?

There is a two year old on this plane who has been wandering up and down approaching strangers and saying “I’m Dante, what’s your name” and everyone he encounters smiles and interacts with the little boy. This is why it surprises me that so many couples choose to have two or three children and stop there.

Have we all become so subservient to contraception, as if it is our master? Why are there not more people who think outside the contraceptive square? And I don’t only mean those Catholics who heed the Church’s vision for life and love and reject contraception for what it is. I also mean average married couples who might say to each other “hey we love children, let’s have lots!”
We really need to get out of our heads that two children are normal. It is only ‘normal’ in a post-industrialised world and in the scheme of things, across time and culture, that is fairly insignificant.

One friend made the point to me recently that perhaps our obsession with two children is partly thanks to the motorcar; after all, to go from a Commodore to a Tarago can be a big deal.

Perhaps the concept has merit, but even so, where are the people who don’t care about the mould, who just love life and want to surround themselves by it?

Pope John Paul II once said that the greatest gift that parents can give their children is the gift of brothers and sisters. Children are good for each other, good for parents, good for marriages and good for society. So if you are reading this and feel like breaking out of the 1.9 children mould, may this be a small encouragement.

Comments are closed.