24 Oct 2008

Oh Mem, what are you doing?

Yes, she's at it again. Only weeks after originally stirring the pot, likening childcare to child abuse, she's taken a second swipe.

Her comments are extraordinarily damaging to the continual battle we have in this country against a pervading motherhood ideology and perceptions about the 'failings' of childcare. Childcare is failing because we have no upward pressure on quality, partly due to this irrational belief that children are always best in the home. How can someone such as Mem Fox get this all so wrong?

Other than the extremely inflammatory and theoretically inconsistent claim that children will suffer brain damage from attending childcare too young, what is most interesting about her comments is the analogies that she draws, which she seems to have just conjured up to support her flawed argument. In this piece she talks about babies being put in childcare at 2 weeks of age for 60 hrs a week. Formal childcare does not accept children under 6 weeks of age and despite a recent report that some children were spending up to 60 hours a week in childcare, it was an extremely small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of children in care across the nation. To boot, that 60 hours of care wasn't necessarily formal care - it was a mix of informal and formal. At the time I commented that it was just another one of those stories feeding into the insecurities of parents needing to put their children in childcare and boosting the 'mummy wars', something that has been also exacerbated by the release of the Productivity Commission interim report around paid maternity leave. Ms Fox is unfortunately doing no favours to a field already misunderstood.

At the end of the article she reveals she's not a fan of young children herself, especially the whiny type. Well Mem, get off your soap box and give people who can tolerate the odd 'whiny' child a chance to advance their profession and do their job instead of reactively receiving body blows because somehow the papers believe that your misinformed celebrity is noteworthy.

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