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Children are the victims of juggling mother syndrome
I'd just like to point out that I am a very, very busy person and I have lots of balls in the air: I am deeply devoted to my children, my family, my husband, my many trips abroad, my charities, my beauty treatments, my gym and my hectic social life, quite apart from my work, and if I write anything misleading in this column, then all I can say is I'm sorry. Obviously all this isn't good enough for some people.
Actually it isn't. The people it isn't good enough for are children. Cherie Blair's notorious apology made blindingly, glaringly obvious something that most people don't say, or won't say. You cannot do all these things and be a good mother.
There are many, many ambitious and successful women who grasp at every opportunity their talents or their connections present, as if merit lies only in doing that. The real merit would lie in sacrificing some of those glittering prizes for the sake of their children. I hate to say this, but I have learnt it the hard way, and I do believe it: women's opportunities have led to the serious neglect of children.
I don't want to attack those women who are forced by necessity to work long hours, and who long to be able to spend more time with their children. I have every sympathy with them. What interests me are those many women who can choose; they are not forced to take on all that they do, but they choose to.
What irritates me is their air of self-congratulation. How can they see themselves as devoted mothers when they are never at home? Children need lots of time. They don't want quality time by appointment; they need their mothers (and fathers) around, to do things with and to talk to. As they get older, they need adult company more and more for conversation, for guidance, for encouragement, for their problems. Instead they get affluent neglect.
I know of countless cases, among my friends and acquaintances, where mothers (and fathers) hardly ever have dinner with their children. It is very difficult, if you work late all the time, and go out very often in the evening, networking and schmoozing and broadening the mind. I can think of one famous woman whose offspring, now grown-up, were literally latchkey children: they let themselves into an empty house after school and found themselves something to eat.
This is commonplace. In other households the children are left to the ministrations of a series of neurotic foreign teenagers with broken English - anorexic, vegetarian, obsessive compulsive or nymphomaniac. I've come across all this and more. The well-to-do are neglecting their children just as much as those struggling to make ends meet, and with their hectic schedules away from home, probably much more. This is not cause for self-congratulation.
Faced with this obvious problem, the cry across the land is for more childcare. More tax relief, more nurseries, more training! But this is quite absurd. There is an absolute shortage of good childcare, for a very obvious reason. The hard truth is that before women had equal opportunities and earlier, before the working classes had opportunities at all, the well-to-do could choose nannies from a large number of intelligent, capable women who had very few other prospects.
Now bright girls have plenty of other prospects and ambitions, and few of them choose childcare. Those that do are likely to be those who can't aspire higher. And even if none of this were true - even if it were "misleading" - there is a problem with numbers. Reliable research suggests that babies and young children need at least one third of a minder. Anyone can do the sums: they don't add up.
The result is there for all to see - child neglect. And I believe it gets much, much worse as children get older. Women talk of going back to work after maternity leave, but I don't think there is any real leave from maternity. It gets more demanding with time, in some ways. Children who can catch buses on their own sometimes need even more careful attention than children still in nappies.
And what about children with disabilities or special needs? Yet from the affluent teenager, with nobody but the Filipina maid to talk to about his Proust or his problems, to the middle-class girl plonked in front of videos with frozen pizza, to the sink estate child who hasn't even been to school, there is neglect everywhere. And this at a time of sentimental child worship, where advertisements play on men with delicious babies and pop stars use toddlers as design accessories.
All this has coincided with a collapse in certain standards. People talk of feral children and it is not an exaggeration. I know quite a few. They smoke dope all day, prefer darkened rooms, are scarily inarticulate and barely know how to use a knife and fork. Britain's increase in illiteracy, innumeracy, truancy, street violence, classroom violence, unmanageable schools, teenage mental illness and suicide (especially among boys) and the explosion of drug and alcohol abuse among school children rich and poor has coincided with what? With working mothers and child neglect.
I don't want to think this. I always wanted to have the same chances as any man to succeed. I don't underestimate the sacrifices involved for an ambitious woman. It is hard to give up success at the height of your powers, and to try to compete with one hand behind your back, and to know that you are losing, and wasting your abilities.
I agree that men should look after their children too, though I resent masculine bossiness in this last bastion of female power. But experience has convinced me that even if you have two people to bring up children together, you cannot have two demanding full-time careers.
My experience on the domestic front has also convinced me that it is boys who suffer far more greatly from neglect than girls.
My mother always used to say that boys were from the first much harder to look after than girls - much more sensitive, more prone to illness and anxiety. She also thought they also need much more careful socialising, for want of a better word. That seemed quite ridiculous to me, until I had children myself and found myself in the world of mothers and children. I now think my mother was right, and there is some scientific evidence to support her.
Girls seem to tolerate neglect much better, like cats. Boys, like dogs, seem more deeply to need constant attention and encouragement, and lots of physical activity, rushing around at high speed. Like dogs, and unlike cats, they need careful training, or socialising. They seem to lack girls' instinctive understanding of social and personal constraints. And without attention they grow wild, undisciplined, morose and very often fat.
Boys have been falling further and further behind, at school, in exams, in behaviour and in confidence; only in their problems do they outstrip girls. This is a recent change, and this, too, coincides with a huge increase in women working, both at jobs and in careers. As I say, I do not think it is merely a coincidence.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 15, 2002
