Collecting my son from nursery is my favourite part of the day. He’s usually in the garden, and there’s a moment just before I say his name when I like to watch him, unnoticed. Then he’ll hear my voice and will turn and run into my arms, smiling. Motherhood has taught me to appreciate the privilege of being loved this much, and of loving so much.
Most of us know from experience that relationships – whomever they are with – benefit from some air being let into them. Kahlil Gibran’s poem On Marriage includes a line my mother often quotes: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.” Yet wanting, or needing, space from your child – to work, to rest, to create, to exercise, to recharge, to see people, to vacuum up all the cat hair in your flat – is being increasingly condemned in online discourse.
If you’re a parent who uses social media, you have probably come across some of it. I have written before about the pressure on modern parents to parent more intensively than ever before, and the conflicted feelings that needing childcare can create in us. Yet it’s only recently that I’ve noticed a trend that is far darker than the pressure and guilt that many parents, mothers especially, grapple with. It is an ideological anti-childcare movement that is beginning to proliferate online.
A recent, much-discussed Times interview with Hannah Neeleman, the “trad wife” influencer known as Ballerina Farm and a mother of eight, who gave up a promising career as a dancer to live a “traditional lifestyle” in rural Utah, told how her husband would not allow nannies in the house. This despite Neeleman becoming so ill from exhaustion sometimes that “she can’t get out of bed for a week” (just one of the many disturbing details in the article).
Trad wife influencer accounts such as Neeleman’s have helped normalise a version of motherhood where a woman’s sole purpose is to nourish her sourdough starter and serve her family. But anti-childcare dogma can be found in other places, too.
Cod psychology clips from supposedly progressive accounts about the danger of placing children in the care of others are becoming commonplace in new parents’ social media feeds. Rooted in warped attachment theory concepts, these videos often use clips from reputable psychologists, but remove them from their original context to spread outlandish claims.
In one video, I watched a woman explain that putting your child in nursery will lead to personality disorders in later life. Others show children crying at drop-off and pickup (needless to say, posting any video of a child in vulnerable moments like this is a gross invasion of their privacy), with captions berating parents for not being there 24/7.
Many of these accounts claim to be hubs for “conscious parenting”, yet bear little resemblance to Dr Shefali Tsabary’s parenting philosophy, which advocates parental self-awareness and emotional self-regulation. Rather, they worship a “traditional” model of parenting that is replete with contradictions – discouraging the use of childcare and promoting the importance of home schooling, while in the same breath worshipping prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, despite evidence that children in these settings were cared for by a range of adults both related to them and not.
That’s just one of the many inherent contradictions of the anti-childcare movement, which is predicated on the belief that a child is always best off in the care of his or her mother (never father), and that other adults have little to offer.
This line of thinking devalues the mother, whose own wishes and ambitions and desires independent of her children must, by necessity, be sublimated. It devalues the father, whose role is limited to that of authority figure and breadwinner or, at the very most, playmate. And it devalues childcare professionals, whose experience, expertise, love and care can contribute so much to children’s lives.
We often talk about the village it takes to raise a child – so why can’t that village include people who are paid professionals? The staff working in my son’s nursery could tell you more about attachment theory than 100 online “mama bears” put together. But of course, the anti-childcare movement, despite its lofty claims, isn’t actually about what is best for children at all.
No sensible, educated person requires me to repeat to them the social, developmental and educational benefits of a good nursery school. Any doctrine that encourages reduced choice for families by forcing mothers to stay at home with the children should be recognised as the regressive ideology it is.
This is the danger when it comes to importing US-based culture wars underpinned by Evangelical Christianity or Mormonism to countries that are far more supportive of parents and more amenable to universal childcare. Conservative ideologues are trying to roll back advances in women’s rights, such as access to abortion, that we thought were settled.
It’s up to parents whether to put their children in childcare – though it’s not always a freely made choice – but even those committed to stay-at-home parenthood should be disturbed by this. The trad wife movement overlaps with white supremacy, fascist ideology and online misogyny, and anti-childcare dogma is forming an increasing part of that far-right picture. It may even be the next frontier.
The anti-childcare movement may have well-established roots in the US – from childcare being framed in the 1960s as a communist plot to destroy the traditional family, to accusations of mass child abuse in the satanic panic of the 1980s – but it has no place in any progressive society with good insight into child psychology and how separation between parents and children can be healthy and beneficial.
So next time one of those videos makes its way into your social media, resist feeling bad – they want to capitalise on maternal guilt. Instead, try to remember a line from another Gibran poem, On Children: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”
What’s working
Speaking of On Children, I’ve gone back to singing my son to sleep recently, but I need to branch out from Molly Malone, Danny Boy and Scarborough Fair, effective though they are. My mother used to sing an a cappella arrangement of On Children by Ysaye M Barnwell, and it’s a beautiful lullaby that is well worth a listen. I’m going to give it a try tonight.
What’s not
Like many others, I was horrified by an article in the Cut by a new mother who had come to resent her cat after her child was born, and am unsure about the ethics of publishing something that essentially normalises animal abuse, from an anonymous writer who clearly needs help. It made me sad because, though any pet will experience a bit of a temporary demotion once a baby is born, my love for Mackerel, my tortoiseshell cat who has tolerated my son’s arrival with as much magnanimity as can be expected, is unchanged.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
