Yes, I ate all the Easter eggs. And that's the least of my sins...
Amid all the excitement, you might have failed to notice groups of mothers hovering around Britain's police stations. With me first in the queue. This was not related to a spate of incidents involving adults eating all the Easter eggs in the house while the children were out at street parties. (Although this did happen and I was one of the key culprits. I have my reasons.)
No, it was because last week an accusation was made. If you're a woman and you've performed acts of work while your children are aged one and under, you are officially a Very Bad Person. An even worse one than if you ate way too much contraband chocolate in the past 48 hours. Half the mothers in the land are guilty. Time to fess up and turn ourselves in. No confectionery in the cells, please.
Why must we submit to voluntary incarceration? Because new statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggest it's high time for a Bad Mothering Amnesty Movement (BadMAM). The latest report shows that in the UK we have (almost) the highest proportion of working mothers in the whole world. Fifty per cent of British mothers go back to work before their child's first birthday. (OK. So I made up BadMAM, but it is real to me and that is all that matters.)
Among 34 industrialised countries, only Denmark comes above us. Just below are the US, Canada and Australia. The same report claimed that the UK numbers are linked to poor results in reading and vocabulary tests for children aged four to seven, especially if the mother returned to work before the child was six months old. What's that you say? Some people are whispering: "Broken Britain"? Yes, they are.
Alert! Alert! Initiate BadMAM! Throw open the cell doors and lock up all salaried female breeders! No chocolate allowance for them! Whatever next? Soon, these women will be expecting to give birth and operate telephones on the same day. Then where will we be? In Denmark, that's where, that well-known land of hippie radicals. And no place to be unless you're mad for herring and aquavit. Two more things which, like maternal employment and the unanticipated theft of Easter gifts, are extremely damaging to a nation's children.
A spokesman from a pressure group called Family and Youth Concern has complained: "Too often, the needs of children take second place to the desires of a minority of women to impose their feminist agenda on every family." Of course, that well-known radical cabal which is taking over the country. They're just like the Jehovah Witnesses but with copies of The Feminine Mystique instead of the Watchtower.
With fire in their belly, hell in their eyes and no nail varnish on their Birkenstock-clad feet, the bra-burners go from house to house urging women to abandon their babies willy-nilly and hop on the next commuter train. "All aboard the Feminist Express!" These harpies are to blame for the necessity of BadMAM. Some say they even condone adult pilfering of children's sweetie supplies. Doorbell rings: "Darling, the feminists are calling again. They say you have to go back to work. And they need more mini eggs."
If only. In truth the "what baby?" career woman is so reviled that she barely exists. A minority of mothers ? 28% ? works within six months of the baby's birth. In seven years of parenting, I have met maybe two women out of hundreds who returned to a full-time job within weeks of giving birth. One was a banker, the other was Karren Brady. Both could afford excellent childcare.
What's actually shocking about this report is not how many women are back working a year after childbirth but how few. Can it really be true that only half of mothers are earning any money at all once their baby is one year old? No wonder so many children's tuck supplies are going missing. The parents cannot afford their own.
It might be that I'm just having a sugar high. Because I am definitely having a sugar high. But it seems to me that this 50-50 figure means perhaps we are getting something right for a change. With half of women working and half not, many families probably have things how they want. Not everyone wants to be a stay-at-home mother and not everyone wants to work. What's right for one family's circumstances would not work for another's. The system we have gives us some choice at least.
It's disturbing, though, that we're still using terms such as "maternal employment" as if we've returned to the 1800s, when there was, by the way, hardly any access to sweeties for parents or children. What will they try to measure next ? lactational insanity? (Genuine Victorian "women's condition". Also known as "being female and hence mad".) Has anyone calculated how many fathers ? or just "parents" ? are in employment when their baby is 12 months old compared with, say, two years ago? In a recession, this might be the one statistic that would actually be both socially revealing and politically useful.
Not that we're in a recession. Perish the thought. Of course there's no recession. Sorry, I went all lactationally insane for a moment then. Must be all this work I've been doing. And the recidivist chocolate theft. Look, here are my hands, just put the cuffs on. And no, those are not Creme Eggs in my pocket. All right, yes, they are. Oops, look, I've eaten them
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