I was watching Dr. Phil today (yes, I admit it!) and they were discussing stay at home mums and working mums, and the issues around this. I have been thinking a bit about this as A gets older, and most of the women in my mother’s group have either returned to work or are planning it.
I am lucky enough to be able to choose to stay at home with A at the moment, and I know that not everyone has the luxury of choice, for financial reasons. The loss of my income to our family is significant, and I am plagued with feelings of guilt about not bringing money in. I have always had a job since I was a teenager, so it is a big change for me. Of course, things are not about ‘me’ any more, but about ‘us’ as a family, but it still feels strange for me. I also had paid maternity leave, and believe strongly that all women should have access to this. I have had the feeling at times that if I returned to work, then we could buy a house, or go on overseas trips, but I think that being at home with her is more important and valuable than that.
I have no urge to go back to work yet, and always planned to be at home for at least the first twelve months of A’s life. I believe that this first year is particularly critical for an infant’s development and my choice is to be with her full-time at this stage. I don’t feel that I’d be able to put her in day care yet. I’m not sure that any mother ‘wants’ to I suppose, but again it comes down to necessity and making choices for yourself. If I had family around me, I may have been much more willing to consider some part-time work, knowing that they could care for A.
Child care is talked about as if it is one entity, but of course there are many options and huge variations in the quality of it. Options range from hiring a nanny to come into your house, giving a consistent one on one figure in the familiar surroundings of your home, to home day care, and centre based day care. And of course, the outcomes for children will depend not only on the type and quality of day care, but also on the age at which they go into care and the length of time they spend there. A child who has full-time day care from eight weeks is a different situation to one who attends three half days a week from age three. And the variable that is often not considered is the quality of the relationship with their parents.
In the 1980s, there were a couple of studies which said that having more than 20 hours a week of childcare in the first year of life was associated with a more insecure attachment relationship between mother and child, but these results were controversial. Other studies found no such difference, and a study was designed to answer this question: The NICDH (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) Study of Early ChildCare and Youth Development. This followed up 1364 children randomly chosen from birth from across the USA, and is still going as the children become older. They found that child care factors themselves (hours, age at entry, quality, frequency of changes in child care) did not predict poor attachment. Children were more likely to be insecurely attached when they had ‘dual risk’ i.e. problems in the relationship with their mother/parent as well as child care factors. Also, good quality child care could ‘compensate’ for a poor mother-infant relationship more than in low-quality care.
(Howes & Spieker: (2008). Attachment Relationships in the context of Multiple Caregivers. In Cassidy and Shaver, (eds.), Handbook of Attachment, 2nd ed (pp 324-325). New York: The Guilford Press.)
The study is large and there are many more factors to take into account, but it seems to confirm that child care itself – particularly if it is high quality – is not a risk factor for poor attachment relationships, and probably what is more important is the quality of the mother-child relationship.
As with most things in parenting, each family makes the choices that are right for them. A mother who feels isolated when she isn’t working, or a family under financial stress, is much more of a problem than a child being in some form of child care.
I have no immediate plans to go back to work yet, and am very happy with that decision – but I know that one day I will be back. I remind myself to enjoy every day I have at home with A, as before I know it, these days will be over.