The true cost of childcare

My younger son was 4 months old when I interviewed for a PhD scholarship, he was 10 months old when I started. I was also completing a PCGE, so when he was 3 months old he started spending small amounts of time with a very carefully selected child minder; chosen for her qualities as mother first and foremost and the fact that she was very experienced at bringing up children in her family home having created a warm, nurturing environment.

I have always been exceptionally pleased with the service she has extended to us. Over recent months, I’ve also been aware that she has been increasingly forced into workshop attendance and subsequent form-filling, policy making and other time-hungry tasks.

This rigid framework now being imposed on the mother-figure specially selected for our babies is really at odds with what we cared about. The more time taken up with administrative tasks, the less time she is able to spend with our child.

It came as no surprise last month that our childminder has decided to use her experience elsewhere as the pleasure of raising of children has been increasingly sucked out of the job. And, actually, I really support her decision.

So I am now in the position of searching for a new childcare provider come the new academic year. This has the potential to be quite damaging to my own ability to carry out my work, not to mention disrupting the emotional security of my children.

We wanted a mother-figure who could raise children. The government want a mother-figure who can evidence meeting predefined criteria through multiple documents.

Where will this documentation culture end?

Best-practice is a wonderful thing, but a top-down enforced structure is not the way to draw out good will. Zygmunt Bauman (2001) has been informing a lot of my thinking about the concept of a community of late, and his description of how workers’ social structures were first broken and then re-established to force behavioural norms to adapt to the industrial revolution are not totally dissimilar to the enforced changes in practice of childcare. Whilst clearly not cruel, I would argue that it is very unnerving and stressful to both our childminder and us.

Incidentally, I still haven’t found a suitable alternative….