This anecdote stunned me when I encountered it in the celebrated Edmund Morris biography of Roosevelt: today, such behavior would be considered rank betrayal of the wife, or even child abuse, given the expectations placed on fathers since women entered the workforce.

The story came to mind recently, when I encountered the convoluted arguments of clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe in her recent book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Saxbe presents new research on the neuroscience of paternity that provides some insights into “dad brain” — a euphemism for the stress, fatigue, and depression often brought on by early parenting. But she argues that the condition is good for men and families, a conclusion that her data does not support. 

I read the book in hopes of curing my own case of “dad brain.” Since becoming a father five years ago, I have often felt that my brain is turning to mush. But my hopes were disappointed. 

Saxbe is the head of the NeuroEndocrinology of Social Ties Lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She researches the brain science of paternity, with a focus on fathers’ involvement in “hands-on” childcare, performing observational, longitudinal studies measuring various aspects of fathers’ brain activity and hormones before and after the birth of their first child. On average, she has found, a man loses “about 1% of his prenatal brain volume” when he becomes a father. Testosterone levels, too, “naturally drop to support their parenting role.” The effect sizes often increase with the volume of childcare. This is true of testosterone, gray-matter shrinkage in the cortex, activity in the amygdala, changes in oxytocin levels, and the daily downward trajectory of cortisol. 

Saxbe argues that “the downsized paternal brain” reflects “more readiness to parent,” and that these changes are positive. When men turn up their childcare “dial,” she contends, everyone benefits: “It’s not just children who gain an advantage from hands-on dads. These fathers reduce their partners’ stress. They enjoy better marriages….”

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Unfortunately, the book suffers from a foundational contradiction. The author claims that fathers are innately “wired to participate in care,” because their brains and bodies respond to babies in ways that “prime nurturing and sensitive caretaking behaviors.” But most of these supposed adaptations only “come online when fathers invest time and practice into parenthood” — that is, when they agree to abide by the prescription that fathers should participate in childcare. 

If fathers “need parental experience in order to trigger adaptation” in the brain and helpful changes such as increases of oxytocin, this does not technically support the interpretation that fathers are “wired” or even “primed” for hands-on caretaking. If that were the case, there should be evidence of brain changes before, during, and after the birth of a first child, but before the father submits to the practice. This is precisely what we find with mothers, who lose nearly 5% of their gray-matter volume during pregnancy, before they have engaged in caregiving. 

The argument, more accurately, is that fathers can adapt to childcare, to some degree, when they have to.  

Saxbe believes they should have to. And her own language betrays both her biases and the incoherence of her position. She writes, “I’ve heard the claim that parenting doesn’t come naturally to men because they lack the biology for it…. But new research can help us shift that narrative by showing us that great parents are made, not born.” If we’re “shifting the narrative,” that means parenting doesn’t come “naturally” to men: it’s constructed. The transformation, as her own data suggest, requires paternal submission to norms and expectations they prefer to avoid — not to mention acceptance of public-messaging campaigns in the form of parenting books.

This bias leads to a great deal of circular reasoning. For example, Saxbe points out that fathers who had “a greater sense of meaning” showed lower stress and found more satisfaction after their child arrived, so she suggests that struggling fathers find “meaning in the everyday toil of parenting.” Because many fathers “fear” that by doing childcare, they will break “an unspoken code of masculinity,” she lauds one psychologist who asks fathers to bring their child into his office as “a form of exposure.” Finally, she reasons that “time, practice, and experience help shape the brain,” and reports that “fathers who took paid leave showed smaller increases in stress and sleep problems after their baby’s birth” — the cure for not wanting to do childcare is more childcare. 

In other words, if a father gets brain damage and depression from doing the unnatural work of hands-on childcare, he should find meaning in his suffering, go to a therapist who treats masculinity as a phobia, and keep doing childcare until the brain damage and testosterone decline makes him forget what vigor ever felt like. If none of the above works, he might consider an inpatient stay at the University of Southern California Re-Education Camp. 

Would fathers and families be better off if the man steered clear of the kiddie stuff? Perhaps staying away from infants, in favor of securing economic resources and warding off external threats? Saxbe never asks this foundational question.

Ample data from many fields indicate that fathers are rather wired to avoid hands-on infant care. The book admits in passing that only 5% to 10% of mammal species feature males who care for their young. It also concedes that fathers today contribute more to childcare than “even the most hands-on hunter-gatherer dad.” In the American anthropologist John Whiting’s study of 136 preindustrial cultures, Saxbe notes, the typical arrangement in about half of the cases is that mom and baby sleep together, and dad sleeps elsewhere. Looking elsewhere, I found that the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of 186 societies shows “regularly close” contact between fathers and infants in only 3 of 154 cultures, about 2%.

Where Saxbe does consider men who work outside the home and avoid all childcare, she frames it as an eccentric privilege exclusive to “billionaires,” never acknowledging that this has been the historical norm for all men, including working-class men. The British social historian Tim Fisher’s 2006 study of working-class British fathers from 1900 to 1939, for example, observed that hands-on care of babies was not expected of fathers at any time in this period.

One of the most inconvenient facts for Saxbe is that, while paternal involvement with childcare has only a weak effect on real outcomes for the child or family — for example, in two large British samples, how frequently fathers changed babies’ diapers and fed them in the first year of life was not correlated with children’s later behavioral problems at ages 3, 9, or 11 — it has a measurable negative effect on income. In 1993, Norway mandated four weeks of paid leave for fathers, which increased the number of men taking leave to 40%, up from 4%, but had only a small effect on children’s test scores at age 16. It did, however, reduce the later earnings of fathers who took the leave, and possibly their partner’s earnings, too. 

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The trade-off between paternal childcare and paternal effort in the economy is thus far from obvious. Compounded over time, it is possible that a family’s lost earnings from paternal childcare outweigh the benefits, especially given that when his child is an infant, most of a father’s wage growth is yet to come. 

There is also the issue that the parents’ personal interests are often in conflict. Saxbe found that mothers recovered better after work when their partners did more of the housework. For the partner, of course, “more housework” represents a loss of professional or personal time that won’t be recaptured. This zero-sum dynamic is suggested by Saxbe’s own research, despite that she goes out of her way to deny it — in the book’s introduction, she explicitly says parenting isn’t zero-sum, for example.  

The primary beneficiary of Saxbe’s cultural engineering is the mother, at least those mothers who have been raised on expectations of gender-neutral parenting, at a cost to the father and the family’s economic security. The book demonstrates a clear physiological and psychological trade-off between the husband’s vitality and the wife’s. “Dads who lost more volume in the cortex told us they had worse sleep quality after birth,” Saxbe writes. “They also felt more depressed and anxious, and they had more mental-health problems, even when we adjusted for their mental health during pregnancy…. The same brain adaptations that seemed to track with fathers’ time and bonding with their infants also signaled mental health risks.” The testosterone findings point in the same direction: men with lower T — presumably those who are doing more childcare and have adapted to it better — “struggled more with their mental health.” Higher-T dads — who presumably feel better overall — “found parenting more challenging” and, no surprise, their partners were “more depressed and unhappy in their relationships.”

Dad Brain attempts to rewrite one of the most universally observed tendencies in family formation on the grounds of neuroscientific evidence which itself does not support the book’s argument. The author sometimes seems to be aware of this, and makes thin, post-hoc justifications such as that she is trying to share a fuller range of options for a diversity of modern family types. She allows that in some cultures, dads who aren’t hands-on make sense, because “a father who drags home a tasty goat increases the odds that his child will survive past infancy” (notice the slightly pejorative, cave-man coding), but dismisses it because “our parenting culture expects a hands-on, low-T style of fatherhood.” 

If “our parenting culture” — defined by the female-majority family sciences — expects a high level of involvement from fathers, then neuroscientific data ought to be tortured into a public advocacy campaign promoting paternal involvement. This is the book’s true reasoning. I found it useful in reverse: it taught me just how important it is for fathers to avoid hands-on infant care at all cost. And if we wonder why our society no longer produces Theodore Roosevelts, Dad Brain has accidentally given us the answer.

It’s always a challenge to balance professional and personal responsibilities, no matter your gender or nationality. The 2022 Autumn of Cough was not just a US phenomenon. But the American mother is always, at any given moment, doing the wrong thing — and, at least in theory, being shamed for it. American motherhood literature emerges, then, from that situation.

An earlier microgeneration of American moms had to contend with parenting advice. Books that explained whether you could drink a glass of wine while pregnant, or how to get your children to eat vegetables. (The answer in all matters was: be like the French.) Today’s reading material, growing out of the lockdown and school closure era as it does, is more nihilistic. The message is: it’s not your fault; everything is systemic. A portrait begins to emerge, in contemporary American mom-lit, of a mother who, rather than taking small steps to ease her suffering, wants to use her own struggles as a starting point to highlight still-greater ones. She’s not a sassy bad mom, but if she moms badly, it is because the system has (and it has!) set her up for failure.

This year, for instance, we have had New York Times parenting journalist Jessica Grose’s book Screaming on the Inside: a well-reported, head-on attack on American mothers’ struggles, which are structural, and worse for the marginalised. We have had, too, the science journalist Chelsea Conaboy’s Mother Brain, which takes a more roundabout approach. Here, too, everything is structural, everything is impossible, but extra impossible if you don’t happen to be straight or white. Arguing contrary to conventional wisdom, Conaboy’s conclusion is that being a mom (or a dad, or a non-binary parent; she doesn’t exclude) can actually make you a better worker.

These books — like the various articles, posts and newsletters making similar cases — are written not, of course, by mothers generally. They are written by a subset of American women who happen to be both writers and mothers, and who apply the liberal critiques common to the world of mainstream journalism to the intractable problem that is American motherhood. They speak to an audience of women who agree with them, but who are too resigned, too exhausted, or privately too convinced the American way is the only valid one, to materially shake things up.

And they, the writers of American motherhood-crisis lit, have a way of blurring material challenges with ambient (and at times imagined) social pressures. Health care bureaucracy and the absence of paid leave, which the writers I mention point out repeatedly, are facts. The requirement to wake up at 4am to bake “dinosaur-shaped muffins that taste like rainbows but are made of steamed arugula” is the stuff of satire but not an actual demand. The suburban writer who recounted, in the New York Times, that “pulling up with the stroller in anything besides smudged black leggings would earn me glares from other moms” at her local play area was reporting on a vibe, not a reality. Who’s to say that if she’d shown up in couture anyone would have cared?

This blurring is an issue because such nebulous plights seem to weigh more heavily on the well-off, but get wrapped up with the ones that operate the way usual plights do, namely by primarily harming have-nots. Grose acknowledges her class privilege, not in a handwringing sense but in a matter-of-fact way, noting that her experience of being able to leave a job without another lined up while pregnant related to her husband’s income. She mentions her mother being a psychiatrist, a plus when she’s having her own struggles with mental health.

The trouble with privilege disclaimers is that they inevitably go on to be about how things are that much worse for those without the same advantages. But are they always? When it comes to things like getting to spend the vomiting phases of pregnancy at home, money helps. Yet some of what Grose describes regarding the pressures to be a “supermom” are specific to the sort of milieu where families have the extra bandwidth to worry about such things. A highly stratified society might be the source of both woes, but it’s unclear whether a year of guaranteed mat leave would impact the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses of school pick-up.

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That is not to say that social pressure on moms isn’t a real thing, or a bad one — or one that purely affects middle-class women. Mothers across the socioeconomic spectrum doubtless feel insecure when they look at those influencer accounts where the flawless-looking mom, surrounded by five perfect angels, holds forth about being #blessed. That is, after all, the business model — you feel bad about your own inadequate life, so you buy whatever it is their sponsored posts are selling.

Grose speaks of algorithms as foisting images of maternal perfection upon unsuspecting women, who then feel they have no choice but to scroll their feeds or even watch their television shows. One sees this a lot in even the best commentary about momfluencers: this idea that you can be minding your own business when suddenly, a white woman with a centre part and beachy waves appears before you, selling you special handbags for “busy moms”, or judging you for your own children’s refusal to try even a small amount of bell pepper. Momfluencers, though, are entirely avoidable, in a way that needing to be in a work meeting and at your child’s doctor’s appointment at the same time is not.

Is there something in the American national character that encourages perfectionism? Something in the baseline impossible situation of American motherhood that promotes aiming higher still? Is the supermom concept just a natural next step, once everyone’s striving in vain regardless? And does all of this idealism serve to obscure the unassailable material facts that no woman can wriggle out of? “Why,” asks Conaboy, “does the United States still lack [a paid maternity leave] policy, more than a century after mothers here formally began lobbying for one?” Her answer is, in part, that “the belief in maternal instinct and biology as destiny — women hold the capacity to care for children, their highest and best use — plus the absolute primacy of the maternal-infant bond”.

Her answer to this is that we must challenge the idea that biology is destiny. She objects that if “the entire infrastructure of mainstream online and in-person support groups is exclusive to birthing, cisgender women, then not only are we telling other birthing parents that they are on their own but we’re sending a message to fathers and partners that this stuff just isn’t really for you”. It’s an interesting idea, but the problem in the States seems more that the people who personally, physically, have babies — the overwhelming majority of whom identify as women — are treated as biologically inconvenient. Easier to just hire a man.

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I was pregnant with my second child during Covid, and expectant fathers, or non-birthing parents otherwise identified, were not allowed to attend obstetrician appointments. This was unpleasant but understandable in the context of an inherently unequal role distribution. The reason the expression “we’re pregnant” grates — and it does — is that only the mother-to-be is avoiding sushi, not that she wants it anyway what with her morning sickness. She’s the one going through ten different dress sizes in the course of a year, and needing sensitive parts of her body stitched back together. Gender identity discourse can serve as a distraction from the material questions of how a society deals with the practicalities of perpetuating the species. And Americans seem uniquely incapable of sensibly dealing with this fact of life.

A culture that actually venerated “the absolute primacy of the maternal-infant bond”, as Conaboy says America does, would prioritise giving new moms a year home with the baby. By not offering paid maternity leave, the US effectively asks new mothers whether they want to have careers or whether they want to be present for the first months of their baby’s life. Are you going to be a businesswoman or a trad wife?

Another way is possible. In Toronto, where I moved in 2015, after growing up and spending most of my 20s in New York City, it’s normal for even the most ambitious women to take a year off work after having a baby. The women one meets at library baby time — and it is almost only women at these — are not, as a rule, stay-at-home moms. This state of affairs exists not because Canadians are somehow more enlightened than Americans about gender essentialism but because of a 1981 postal worker strike. But for whichever mix of cultural and political reasons, American mothers bemoan the status quo, without being empowered to change it.

There’s something bleak about Conaboy’s insistence, central to her book, that contrary to popular belief, being a mom actually makes you a better worker bee. All this scientific backup for the much-repeated pleas about how moms are pros at multitasking — to what end? American employers view having a child as an inconvenient lifestyle choice that they have no obligation to accommodate. Imagine going to the American boss who has groaned when you’ve shared your good news and saying, look, studies show that my brain will be sharper than ever when I get back, see you in a year! Although when you’re in that situation, your choice of words could not matter less.

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American motherhood lit can at times be hazy about what’s specific to the US and what’s a broader facet of having children in the modern world. Even in countries with superior paid-leave policies, employers whinge when expecting mothers announce what’s coming. There are mothers all over the world who find themselves effectively shut out of the workforce because childcare is too expensive. And the existence of paternity leave doesn’t prevent the arrival of a baby from changing the gender dynamics in a hetero household. Some of this is just, life has its challenges, and no particular policy shift, in any direction, would make things otherwise.

And yet. The solutions to the American motherhood crisis are mundane: maternity leave obviously, socialised medicine indirectly, and maybe reduce the chance of school shooting by not effectively handing out guns to anyone who so much as ponders getting one. All of this could transpire without any sort of communist revolution. There could still be fast fashion and plastic toys and food colouring.

But US exceptionalism is a powerful drug. To change what is at this point the American way might mean accepting that other places sometimes — no, not always, but sometimes — do in fact, objectively, have the right idea.

Me: “Time to get in the bath.”
Her: “But I don’t want a bath.”
Me: “You’re still having a bath.”
Her: “You can’t make me.”
Me: “Actually, I can.” [picks up protesting child, places child in bath]

Is this an act of oppression? The journalist Noah Berlatsky might say so. “’Parent’ is an oppressive class,” he wrote recently, “like rich people or white people”. For if you believe all coercion is unjust, the fact that parents often make their kids do things against their will surely qualifies as oppressive. So dedicated egalitarians must either not have kids, or else do everything possible to avoid making this inevitable oppression worse than it has to be. As Berlatsky puts it: “There are things you can do to try to minimize the abuse that’s endemic to the parent/child relationship, but it’s always there”.

How, then, does someone who is opposed to oppression in all forms deal with the occasional need to tell your kids what to do? Look no further than the kids’ TV programme which provokes more Mumsnet rage than any other: Bing.

For readers fortunate enough never to have encountered Bing, it depicts humanoid CGI-animated animal children, of what looks like pre-school age. The characters live in a manicured suburb, where they are cared for by tiny toy-like creatures that appear to represent their parents or — more usually — other carer types such as nannies or grandparents. The eponymous bunny, Bing, is cared for by a small entity called “Flop”. Their relationship is never explained, though Bing addresses Flop by his first name, suggesting he is perhaps some kind of childcare professional.

Episodes always follow the same format. Bing and Flop go about their usual day, when a moment of conflict or heightened emotion occurs: a balloon bursts, Bing’s friend won’t let him have a turn on the swing, Bing kills a butterfly, Bing breaks a window in the garden playing football. The children express (muted) emotions, and the tiny carers explain in soft, gentle voices what went wrong, then suggest something to “make it better”.

The hyper-emphasis on persuasion and gentleness evidenced by Flop (and Berlatsky) may seem peculiarly of our time. But this softly-softly take on parenthood is a well-trodden path. Consider, for example, the 1849 poem Speak Gently, by David Bates:

Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild:
It may not long remain.

Bates’s poem was popular enough at its time to reappear in (ultimately far more famous) parodied form in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the grotesque Duchess sings to her howling infant:

Speak roughly to your little boy.
and beat him when he sneezes:
he only does it to annoy,
because he knows it teases.

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But it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the balance of parenting advice began to shift decisively against Carroll’s “Duchess”, toward the feather-soft Flop school of child management. The 1922 manual Common Sense in the Nursery, for example, is a typical example of post-war “behaviourism”:

“By training the baby to lie alone […] by feeding him four-hourly by day and not at all by night, a woman is able to lead a human life instead of having it completely disorganised.”

This is hardly beating a baby when he sneezes; but it assumes a child should be as far as possible trained to fit in with parents’ wishes. By the mid-20th century, though, a growing body of advice reversed the polarity. In Baby and Child (1977) Penelope Leach asserted that a baby cannot be “spoiled”, because “they are not grown up or clever enough to be spoiled”. Instead, a mother should fit her own activities to the baby’s point of view. Despite being “very hard work”, Leach thought, this was in fact the best path to happiness not just for the child but for mummy as well: “taking the baby’s point of view does not mean neglecting yours, the parents’ viewpoint. Your interests and his are identical … If you make happiness for him he will make happiness for you.”

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This progressive inversion of the balance of power in a parent/child relationship is perfectly captured by the relative size of the adult and child characters in Bing. My daughter was mistaken to think I couldn’t make her have a bath, because I’m physically much bigger than her, and happy to use that advantage to enforce personal hygiene. But Flop is around a third of Bing’s size, so if Bing sat down on the bathmat and refused to get in the bath, Flop would not be able to make him comply.

Luckily, unlike in the real world, in Bing world this sort of adult/child conflict of wills never happens. Instead, Bing is the ideal child, as depicted by 20th-century progressive parenting guru Benjamin Spock, who opined in Baby and Child Care (1955) that “If a child is handled in a friendly way, he wants to do the right thing, the grown-up thing, most of the time”. From this perspective, there’s no need for discipline because, all you need is love.

A decade later, Californian therapist Carl Rogers was making a similar argument in the realm of psychotherapy. Rogers argued against Christianity’s pessimistic take on humans’ baked-in propensity for evil, the doctrine of original sin, as well as the psychoanalytic reworking of original sin in the form of “id”, “libido” and “death instinct”. Contra these downbeat visions of human nature, Rogers argued that “the innermost core of man’s nature, the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his ‘animal nature’ is positive in nature — is basically socialised, forward-moving, rational and realistic”.

In this view, bad deeds are not a consequence of human nature, but only ever a result of trauma, ignorance or error. There’s no need for containment or discipline, only forgiveness and education — or, as Rogers would put it, “unconditional positive regard”.

When Bing breaks the window of the garden shed after Flop already suggested (in the usual gentle voice) that he refrain from kicking the ball hard, Bing is guilty and apologetic. But of course this is a mistake, not disobedience, so when he whines to Flop “I forgetted about the big kicks”, Flop just soothes: “It’s easy to forget”. There are no further consequences. Indeed, the only reason to impose rules at all is personal safety, as evidenced by the uncharacteristic firmness with which Flop orders the children away from the broken glass.

If we take Bing as an idealised template for what both parents and children are meant to look like, it’s a rosy vision of humans as fundamentally innocent and good, and of optimum development as ordered mainly around the child’s needs.

Bing is never aggressive, capricious or lacking in empathy. He never throws a tantrum. He’s a very 21^st-century mixture of ignorant, self-centred and susceptible to guilt trips: the perfect child-centred child. Responsible adults organise their lives around the children’s needs and desires, never themselves express any emotion (especially not anger) and don’t leave children to resolve conflict between them, and only impose clear rules when physical safety is at risk. There’s no punishment, no one ever loses their rag, there’s no need to make the kids do anything, ever.

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If there’s a reason Bing prompts so much swearing on Mumsnet, it’s because this is an insanely rosy view of what wrangling small children is actually like. Already in 1969, Benjamin Spock was warning that touchy-feeliness can go too far, observing in an updated edition of Baby that in fact love is not all you need. Parents have “welcomed new theories’, Spock observed, but “They have often read meanings into them that went beyond what the scientists intended—for instance, that all that children need is love; that they shouldn’t be made to conform … that whenever anything goes wrong it’s the parents’ fault; that when children misbehave the parents shouldn’t become angry or punish them but try to show more love”.

Berlatsky is half-right, but not in the way he thinks: oppression is indeed baked into the parent/child relationship, if by “oppression” you mean hierarchy and occasionally coercion. But he, and proponents of radically egalitarian parenting in general, are wrong to imagine this dynamic should be minimised. On the contrary, the fact that parents have authority over their children should be cheerfully embraced, for the child’s psychological health.

Whether you call it original sin or the death instinct, all humans come with a capacity for darkness as well as light. My experience as a parent is that this isn’t the product of culture: it’s baked in. We don’t have to beat our children for sneezing to know it’s not enough to claim our dark side can be loved away. Sometimes it needs to be contained, by clear boundaries lovingly maintained.

If we fail to do this, the result isn’t kinder or more moral individuals; it’s more stunted ones. If parents convey the message that the only permissible emotions are sanitised ‘positive’ ones, never hatred, greed, envy, vengefulness or rage, it becomes the child’s responsibility to keep a lid on his or her own strong feelings. I know poor Bing is not a real person, but I’m still horrified by how limited the range of his emotional responses is. Even when Pando smashes Bing’s best sandcastle, all Bing manages is a plaintive, vaguely passive-aggressive ‘awww, that was our biggest sandcastle ever’.

At the end of each episode, Bing breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, offering a summary of what happened and how it made him feel. Usually what Bing felt was ‘sad’, and even if it’s ‘angry’ this is relayed in a sad voice. I can only conclude that this poor anthropomorphic bunny-child has already learned to prune his own emotions into an acceptably progressive range.

For this is what it looks like when parents refuse to step up to the position of authority our children need us to take. The result will either be out-of-control kids desperate for someone to provide some containment, or else the stunted feelings of someone who has learned it’s not safe to throw a wobbler. So Berlatsky is right that parents are tyrants, but his mistake is to imagine that this is a bad thing. The loving imposition of authority by parents, in a child’s interests, is not oppression. It’s a vital condition for the inverse of oppression: safety, freedom, and the space to be a child.

If we are reluctant to dwell on the reality of human vulnerability at either end of life, we are unwilling to give much thought to its corollary: that (somewhere safely hidden from the more exciting business of being healthy, youthful and autonomous) there must be people caring for those who are unable to do it themselves. Someone is wiping those bottoms.

Traditionally, this job of caring for the very old and the very young has been “women’s work”. To a great extent, it still is: the OECD reports that, worldwide, women do between two and ten times as much caring work as men.

In the UK, this tends in statistics to be framed as “unpaid work”, a sort of poor relation of the economically productive type that happens in workplaces and contributes to GDP.

Carers UK suggests there are around 9 million people caring for others in the UK part or full-time, of whom up to 2.4 million are caring for both adults and their own children. Women carry out the lion’s share of this work: 60% according to the ONS. Full-time students do the least and, unsurprisingly, mothers with babies do the most. Older working women carry the heaviest load of people in employment, with those in the 50-60 bracket being twice as likely as their male counterparts to be carers whether of a vulnerable adult, a partner or a child or grandchild.

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Second-wave feminism pushed hard against the pressure women experience to take on this work of caring. Within this variant of liberalism, caring work is routinely framed as a burden that imposes an economic “penalty” while harming the economy by keeping skilled women away from the workplace. The OECD report cited above states: “The gender gap in unpaid care work has significant implications for women’s ability to actively take part in the labour market and the type/quality of employment opportunities available to them.”

The implication is that, once freed of this obligation, women can then pursue more fulfilling activities in the workplace.

So what does this liberation look like in practice? According to a 2017 report by the Social Market Foundation, women in managerial and professional occupations are the least likely to provide care, as are people with degree qualifications. The number working in routine occupations who also donate more than 20 hours a week of care in their own homes is far higher than those in intermediate or professional occupation.

In other words, higher-earning women are to a far greater extent able to outsource the wiping of bottoms to less well-off people, who are themselves typically women: 90% of nurses and care workers are female.

These women are then too busy to wipe the bottoms of their own old and young, who are sent into institutional care. Such institutions are typically staffed by women, often on zero hours contracts, paid minimum wage to care for others all day before going home to do so for their own babies and elderly. The liberation of women from caring is in effect a kind of Ponzi scheme.

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This is a problem for our liberal society, for two interlocking reasons. Firstly, the replacement of informal family-based care with a paid, institutional variety renders caring impersonal, in a way that invites cruelty. Indeed, cases of care home abuse are well documented – see here, here or here – and the number is rising: the CQC received more than 67,500 in 2018, an increase of 82 per cent over the already too high 2014 figure of 37,060.

It is difficult to see how this could be otherwise. Caring for those who are physically or mentally incapacitated is emotionally testing even when we love those we care for. An exhausted worker on a zero-hours contract, paid the minimum wage to perform more home visits than she can manage in the allotted day, is unlikely to have a great store of patience to begin with, let alone when faced with a refractory “client”. The entire system militates against kindness.

Secondly, and relatedly, it turns out that the informal, traditionally female networks in which caring for the young and old once took place were actually quite important. Those networks also ran church groups, village fetes, children’s play mornings – all the voluntary institutions that form the foundation of civil society.

When caring is treated as “unpaid work” and we are encouraged to outsource it in favour of employment, no one of adult working age has time for voluntary civil society activities any more. If the number of people caring informally for relatives is waning, replaced by institutional care, so is voluntarism: between 2005 and 2015 alone there was a 15% drop in the number of hours donated (ONS).

The result is loneliness. Almost 2.5m people aged between 45 and 64 now live alone in the UK, almost a million more than two decades ago. Around 2.2 million people over 75 live alone, some 430,000 more than in 1996. In 2017, the Cox Commission on loneliness described it as “a giant evil of our time”, stating that a profound weakening of social connections across society has triggered an “epidemic” of loneliness that is having a direct impact on our health.

Several generations into our great experiment in reframing caring as a burden, we are beginning to count the cost of replacing mutual societal obligations with individual self-fulfilment: an epidemic of loneliness, abuse of the elderly and disabled in care homes, substandard childcare. A society liberated from caring obligations is, with hindsight, a society liberated from much that was critically under-valued.

What is the alternative? Some would prefer a more communitarian approach to caring for the old and the young. Giles Fraser recently wrote on this site that caring for the elderly should be the responsibility of their offspring:

“Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. […] Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t.”

These are strong words and there is much to agree with, but the barest glance at the statistics shows that in practice what that means is “women have a responsibility to look after their parents”.

Suggested reading

How to make Britain One Nation again

By David Skelton

If we are to count the costs of liberating society from mutual caring obligations, we must also count the benefits, as well as who enjoyed them. Society once encouraged men to seek worldly success, underpinned by the imposition of an often-suffocating domestic servitude on women.

Liberalism blew this out of the water by declaring that in fact both sexes were entitled to seek some form of worldly activity and fulfilment. It is not enough to point to negative side effects of this change and say: “Someone needs to be resuming these mutual caring obligations or society will disintegrate.”

To women well-accustomed to the widespread tacit assumption that it is they who will pick up those underpants, wash up that saucepan, pack that schoolbag and so on, this sounds a lot like a stalking-horse for reversal of societal changes that, on balance, most of us greatly appreciate. In truth no one, whether liberal or post-liberal, wants to confront the enormous elephant that liberal feminism left in society’s sitting room: the question of who cares. Who, now that we are all self-actualising, is going to wipe those bottoms? There are no easy answers.

There’s a broad consensus that the earliest years are the most important in a child’s development. Thus as well as enabling more women to (re)enter the workforce, childcare programmes provide a channel for state support to children long before they get to school.

Further reading

Who are the the cyber-nannies coming for?

By Peter Franklin

So how did the Quebec programme work out? Not so well, according to an eye-opening article by Jenet Erickson for the Institute for Family Studies article:

“Comparisons between children ages 2 to 4 who had been exposed to the program, with older children (and siblings) who had not, revealed significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression in those exposed to the program. And the analyses found more hostile, inconsistent parenting, and lower-quality parental relationships among parents of children exposed to the program.”

A more recent study provides even more cause for concern:

“Twenty years after the Quebec program’s implementation, a second set of comprehensive analyses were conducted by Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan (forthcoming, in the American Economic Journal). After replicating the previous results for children ages 0 to 4, the authors explored whether the negative outcomes associated with exposure to Quebec’s early, extensive day care program persisted into ages 5 to 9, the pre-teen years, adolescence, and young adulthood.

Their research confirmed that the negative effects did continue, and in some cases became stronger across development. “

Nor do these negative outcomes appear to be particular to Quebec:

“…the findings from the Quebec program are largely consistent with findings from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s comprehensive evaluation of day care in the United States.”

Worrying stuff, but does it mean that childcare is necessarily a bad thing? No:

“As with the persistence of negative effects across development, there is also evidence for the persistence of positive effects when children are exposed to the highest quality daycare. Higher adult-child ratios and more sensitive and positive caregiving in day care have consistently been associated with better cognitive performance and fewer behavioral problems in children.”

Unsurprisingly, most of the facilities in the Quebec study were not of the highest quality, in fact “60% of the universal daycare program sites in Quebec were judged to be of ‘minimal quality’”.

Further reading

Loss of community places a heavy burden on young families

By Peter Franklin

Of course, quality has to be paid for – and if that isn’t to mean exclusive access for the wealthiest parents, some form of government support is required. In many countries where government has intervened, the emphasis appears to be on quantity not quality; which suggests that the priority is to increase supply to the labour market and not giving children the best possible start in life – especially the most vulnerable children.

Looking at a wider set of education policy priorities one has to ask why so many governments have put the expansion of higher education before investment in the best quality early years education and support. We should have begun at the beginning – and by channeling help to the families where it would have made the biggest difference – but we didn’t. For some reason it was thought more important to expand the range of degree-only professions.

I suspect that 20 years from now we will look back on the big choices that were made 20 years ago, and wonder how we could have got it so wrong.