TODAY it is more common than not for small children to be placed in a day nursery so that their mothers can go out to work. Free childcare is offered to working parents of infants aged from nine months to two years for up to 30 hours a week, 38 weeks of the year. Such assistance is available only to be used for accredited childminder/day nursery care. Mothers who wish to be their own infant’s child-carer are ineligible – they are excluded from this help, as are grandmothers or other family members.
Mothers At Home Matter (MAHM) is a rare voice representing those mothers who want the choice to care for their children at home for as long as they feel is right. It is unique in its impartial advocacy for maternal choice about childcare, for mothers’ needs and for the child’s right to be nurtured and brought up by its mother. The singularity of this maternal approach and analysis was thrown into sharp relief by two recent reports which focus on the harms of the current ‘culture’ of childcare: one on the harm done to children’s early development by the government-supported way of caring for them, the other on the harm or damage experienced by working mothers. Neither report, despite their dire findings, seemed able to break free of vested economic and ideological interests to provide the clear-sighted diagnosis necessary to repair the damage they find.
First, the damage to children revealed by the Kindred Squared School Readiness Survey. The purpose of this was to assess the skills of four-year-olds entering reception classes in September 2025, and it reported an increasing number struggling with key skills. Thirty-seven per cent were simply not ‘school-ready’, a rise from 33 per cent the year before. Twenty-five per cent did not have basic lancontrary to previous research which has claimed the benefits and denied the downsides of early day careguage skills, 26 per cent were not toilet-trained and 28 per cent could not eat or drink independently. All these figures are above 2024 levels. Self-evidently, deficiency in these skills seriously affects a child’s readiness to learn, as the report testifies, contrary to previous research which has claimed the benefits and denied the downsides of early day care.
Second, the damage to mothers revealed by a survey conducted by Make Mothers Matter, an international NGO which campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of mothers. ‘The state of motherhood in Europe’ in 2024 surveyed 9,600 mothers across 12 countries, including the UK. It found that 50 per cent of mothers suffered some form of mental ill-health and 67 per cent felt overloaded and unsupported.
The first report lets slip what is holding back the development of day care children. One teacher, talking about reception pupils’ school-readiness, said: ‘These children are in at 7.30am and being picked up at 6pm . . . I think, well, that’s why you don’t read, that’s why you don’t do your homework, that’s why you don’t know these things . . . because your parents are having to work every hour under the sun.’ Yet the survey failed to include a ‘fewer hours at work’ option in the list of remedies from which parents were invited to choose. Nowhere does the report acknowledge that overworking might affect parents’ ability to prepare children for school. Instead, more of the same is demanded: cheaper nurseries, although these clearly do not guarantee school readiness.
Parents do not however see the problem as relating to their own overworking, as their two favourite solutions to their ‘stress’ indicate. Some 48 per cent want more affordable day care provision, and 47 per cent want better information about what ‘school readiness’ means. While admitting that parental screen time needs reducing (42 per cent) many think improving several kinds of community support could help (30-38 per cent).
Parental claims of ignorance as to what ‘school readiness’ means suggest too that they have deflected responsibility for their children’s development on to the state. The survey reveals parents’ reluctance to question, on their children’s behalf, the good of overworking. While the conclusions of the surveys speak to the need to shift to a system which values care as vital to societal stability and well-being, both leave the cultural norm of working motherhood unchallenged. While proclaiming the social and life-enhancing value of care and recognising the collective responsibility of raising children, the reports suggest this duty of care is the job of people other than mothers and assisted by conditions set by government and employers.
Workplace rigidity, career stagnation, reduced wages, inadequate maternity/paternity leave, gender inequality at home and expensive childcare are all reported to affect the working mother. The state of motherhood report returns to the institution that has created the problem for the solution. It recommends that between them, governments and employers must provide enhanced mental health support, flexi-working, job-sharing, equal pay for equal work, pension credits for time out to care, career development programmes for part-time working mothers, longer maternity/paternity leave, quality affordable childcare, certificates of care competence to ensure transferability of these skills into the workplace and ‘transformative policies ensuring companies adapt to workers’ needs’. It is implied that these will result in good health and happiness for mothers.
Yet the results of its own survey offer no evidence – because none was sought – of mothers’ own understanding of their mental health and how it might be improved. There is no space for any suggestion that mothers should have control over whether, when and how much they work while bringing up children. The report silently honours the principle that mothers caring for infants must work like anyone else under conditions regulated by state and employer in concert. As far as the surveys were undertaken with children’s or mothers’ interests in mind, they reveal a culture in which parents plead with government for mitigations to suffering caused by work. Children are being let down by the nurseries provided to release parents for work; mothers’ jobs are driving them to guilt, exhaustion and mental breakdown. Yet the principle of working motherhood enjoys the status of a sacred cow, an institution beyond question.
