Why I Support Paid Maternity Leave
About a week ago, a friend posted a status update that I found both saddening and offensive. The post related to speculation about paid maternity leave, and the offensive bit was her use of the term ‘breeders,’ but that is easily brushed aside.
The saddening part related to the assumptions it revealed about her attitudes to children and society. Basically her point was why should they get money to stay at home and have babies, and if they do why can’t I have extra recreation leave and money to travel? I would like to pick apart some of these assumptions, for they are quite common, and in doing so convey why I am in favour of paid maternity leave. First, a disclaimer: I do have children, but did not benefit from any form of maternity leave, paid or otherwise.
The underlying assumption in the statement is that children are a lifestyle choice concerning purely the individual and therefore should be solely the individual’s responsibility. Pardon my French, but that is a load of crap: every society needs to reproduce itself. The reproduction is not simply the replacement of physical bodies; we trust parents to raise children to reproduce the culture and values of our society. But children and young people are not stupid. Of course they can see the values that their parents and teachers model, but they are also acutely aware of the values of the society around them and the place that they are given in it. If we teach them through our attitudes and public policies that children are not appreciated, not welcome, are a burden on taxpaying individuals, then this is what will be reproduced. They will learn that it is every individual for themselves, that community and collective care are not important, and that you don’t have compassion for the weak. An African proverb states that “it takes a community/village to raise a child.” Children learn their place, values, and identity partly from the society around them. What, seriously, do we want them to learn? Nelson Mandela said something along the lines that you can assess a society by the way that it treats its weakest members. If we treat children like they are not wanted and are burdens, what kind of society do we have and what are we teaching them? That in thirty or forty years time they should not have compassion for the unwanted burdens of an aged population?
In reproducing children and thereby the culture and values of the society, parents are performing a social service and children are a collective asset. Not only do children replace the workforce, but they refresh the culture and challenge the ‘common sense’ of our thinking and practices, especially as they grow out of childhood and become young people. Yet too often young people are represented in our media as ‘troublesome’ or out of control, reflecting our own insecurities about the world that we are creating.
Let’s help parents to do the job of raising children well, as ultimately it benefits all of us. Even babies pick up on stress, so let’s help where we can to reduce the stress that comes either from parents having to go back to work before they and babies are ready, or from struggling to cope financially while taking time out of the workforce. The relationship with parents and other relatives, the patterns of discipline, and the dispositions of the child are all set in those crucial early years. So let’s give parents the chance to make the best they can of this time. But this doesn’t mean enforced absence from the workplace for a set period – the aim is to make it as easy as we can for parents to raise well-adjusted, healthy, social beings. Some parents will find that they can best do this by re-engaging with paid work earlier than others.
This brings me to another assumption that my friend made in suggesting additional recreation leave as compensation for non-parents: maternity leave is not a holiday. Parenting – properly looking after a child and teaching them appropriate behaviour and social skills – is darned hard work, requiring consistency of effort and energy that I suspect few people who have not raised children can truly appreciate.
The final assumption that I want to deal with relates to the economic side of the issue. My friend’s comments betray resentment that her taxes were being used to pay for benefits that she would not enjoy. We tend to explain taxes as the money that we pay to the government to provide the services that we use. I have been guilty of using this explanation myself, but it is wrong. Taxes are, or at least should be, about building the kind of society that we want. As a child I benefited from the taxes and distributive policies in place at the time and they contributed to my lifelong sense of identity and belonging in my society. My children’s generation are benefiting from the taxes and distributive policies in place while they are growing up and these will similarly have long-term effects on how they see themselves as citizens. Taxes are a pay-forward system, and there is a lag of about twenty years on the finer implications of most social policies. Taxes aren’t just about paying for what we as individuals use – they are about shared priorities and building a society that reflects the values that we think are important.
So this is why I support paid maternity leave. I still like to believe that we live in a society that can act collectively to express values of care and compassion, and not that we are simply gathered individuals looking out only for our own interests.
Your Comments
Matthew Smith writes:
As a parent of two young children, I’ve also been quite upset by comments left on news sites using language like breeders, making ignorant statements about overpopulation and accusing parents of selfishly having children for their own pleasure or to get benefits. It’s a confusing debate because I think most parents don’t know why they have kids. It’s just what you do, it seems like we get to a point in life and think, hey a baby seems like a good idea and away you go. We don’t have a scientific rational basis for all our decisions.
But if you want to get purely rational, as you say, the population needs to be refreshed and hopefully with young enthusiastic people who will make good decisions and take pity on us in our old age, responding with compassion to our generation and the decisions we made which weren’t always the best and sometimes the product of the generations before us. So I agree with your statements about the values we communicate about the kind of society we wish for / hope for through our public policy.
Also as you say, having kids is pretty damn hard and it’s not like we’re having a big holiday floating on the wads of cash that the government throws at us. The reality is that with double income families now, the cost of living has adjusted so that single income families can barely survive without government help. My family has one full-time income and one part-time, we barely break even most months and if it wasn’t for family day-care benefit and other government entitlements, we would be out of the race – ie. living in and raising my children in public housing – which do you think is better for the tax payer and the country?
As for maternity leave, the research suggests that stressed mothers lead to unhealthy kids – ie physically unhealthy children, if affects their development in the womb and those early months of life are crucial to determining a child’s general outlook and temperament. What is needed in these early months is a one-on-one solid bond to develop a general sense of security and well being in the world. How do you measure that in tax payer dollars?
Posted: 24 04 2009 - 12:02 | Permanent link to this comment
Catriona writes:
How fascinating, Lisa. I would have made one of the same arguments myself in support of paid maternity leave (the one re. raising a child being extremely hard work) but I would also make another: without paid maternity leave, one parent will almost certainly have to leave their job to care for the child during its early months (even if they are willing and able to return to work while the child is still an infant). And that parent is so, so often the mother, not for practical reasons but also because of socio-cultural pressure.
So paid maternity leave is also a way of allowing a mother to keep to her foot in the door of a career or job she may have worked damn hard for, or may thoroughly enjoy, or may desperately need. Should we return to an era when women did just slip out of the workforce when they had children? My mother (who did return to work) was of such a generation, and I saw the problems that caused among her peers, when skills atrophied and financial situations changed.
But I’m also not comfortable with a quid pro quo approach to maternity leave, because if we do that, what else can we apply that to? I don’t need paid maternity leave, but I also don’t need a disability pension, and old-age pension, or the dole. These are things that a responsible society does: it cares for those who are unable to care for themselves. (Of course, the rhetoric, as long as terms such as “dole bludger” proliferate, has shifted from “can’t care for themselves” to “won’t care for themselves,” which I find unacceptable.)
I just find it odd, I suppose, that paid maternity leave isn’t wholeheartedly embraced.
Posted: 24 04 2009 - 14:12 | Permanent link to this comment
Catriona writes:
Matt, you’re almost certainly right that most parents don’t have a scientific rational basis for having kids, but so what? I don’t have a scientific rational basis for wearing my hair shoulder length, but no one challenges me on it, despite the fact that I almost certainly use up (marginally) more of the world’s resources in keeping it clean than I would if I shingled it. Why would parents (except in specialised cases for which government oversight is in place) have to provide a rationale for procreation?
(On the other hand, I would like to make the point that it is not impossible to raise perfectly healthy and happy children in public housing, especially in Australia where public housing is generally detached or semi-detached, and often spread out rather than being clumped into an estate: it generally doesn’t—and shouldn’t—breed the same sense of ghettoisation that is such a problem in England. I know that living in public housing can have a poor effect on an individual’s self-image, but public housing is, as with the other issues I raised in my last comment, one of those things that a responsible government should provide for its people.)
Posted: 24 04 2009 - 14:26 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
Thanks for your comments Matt and Catriona.
Matt, I think at the individual level none of us really is sure why we have kids, but I’m pretty certain that part of it is socialisation; i.e. another one of ways that a society ensures its own reproduction. Sometimes though, that impulse conflicts with other aspects of socialisation. No society is totally uniform in its socialisation.
Catriona, I think the reason that having children is regarded differently to disability is because there is a perceived element of choice in operation making it easier to classify having children as a ‘lifestyle choice’. The issue with age pensioners has to more with the deserving/undeserving divide. However, Tony Abbott was notorious for calling unemployment a ‘lifestyle choice’.
I did live in public housing for a time as a child, and I saw that as one of the ways that society showed its care of me and my family. We were prioritised on the list because we had to leave the house we were in as it was condemned and we had moved so many times that my sister and I had very disrupted schooling. I suspect that part of the reason that we moved so often was due to financial stress, and I remember being aware of financial stress in the household and the effects that it had on my mother from the age of about five, even though it was never discussed in those terms. Our public housing was, as Catriona rightly points out, detached and in the midst of privately owned housing, and we were also supported by a very caring Church at the time.
The acceptance and caring shown to children by the members of that Church is another of the factors that helped me to develop an understanding of my place and role in society and as a community member. But I also have experience of other Church situations where children were not made to feel welcome.
John and I are extremely grateful to both of you and our other friends for the way that you have welcomed and accepted our kids. A lot of their (relative) maturity can be attributed to your attitude towards them.
Change is slow. It is interesting what you say about your mother returning to work, Catriona. At the time I had my kids there was a very brief period of paid maternity leave (about six weeks, I think) available to some public servants but it was not widespread. Many of the places that I worked still expected that you would resign once you were heavily pregnant, even though by that point we had witnessed the demise of the ‘family wage’ and child-related payments had not caught up with that fact.
Posted: 24 04 2009 - 15:56 | Permanent link to this comment
Catriona writes:
My association of maternity leave with disability payments and pensions was problematic, I admit. I was thinking more in terms of what you mention above re. Abbott: the (to my mind, highly dangerous) way of thinking that breeds terms such as “dole bludgers.” When such terms become the accepted way to think about these issues, people in need are reluctant to claim the assistance that a responsible government should provide for them. It becomes something shameful when it should never, ever cause embarrassment.
I can see maternity leave becoming subject to the same problem.
My mother returned to work twice: very soon after the birth of my elder sister (in 1970) and then five years after the birth of my younger brother, when all three of her children were in school (in the mid-1980s).
In the first instance, she had a family network, including her mother, who were willing and able to provide free babysitting services. By the time I was born, we had moved from England to a very small town in Scotland. By the time my brother was born, we had moved halfway around the world, where she had not network at all. I’m quite sure these were factors in her absenting herself from the workforce for eight years.
However, we were also fortunate in being a middle-class family, in which both members had professional jobs. My father’s position as a veterinarian made it possible for him to support four other people on a single wage. And that’s an extremely fortunate position for us to have been in.
And that’s also where my concerns with debates over maternity leave lie. Some families cope very comfortably with only one income, as we did. Many, many families do not, and that’s where maternity leave can be vital.
Posted: 24 04 2009 - 19:30 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
I’m not sure that it is always so simple as middle-class or working class, though I’m pretty sure that the mother having professional qualifications helps with workforce re-entry. By the time my first child was three I had already missed several new versions of software and that would have made re-entry to my prior line of work difficult even though I kept my basic skills current.
I think the really important part is acting as a society to make it as easy as possible for parents to do a good job raising children. If that means paid maternity leave, so be it. If it means subsidized high quality full-day care, so be it. And if it means providing professional support networks for young families that don’t have adequate family and friends support, so be that too. In the long run, the payoffs far outweigh the costs, but the costs of stress and dysfunction are frequently life-long. We just don’t notice it as much because the monetary cost of paid maternity leave are highly visible in the here and now while the benefits (or costs) of adequate, and yes responsible, provision (or lack of such) are largely invisible in monetary terms and spread across many years.
Posted: 24 04 2009 - 21:58 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
Heh, my public housing comment was really dumb: we would just need to reallocate some things but I’m so mad at some of the stuff people have been saying on other forums. Great comments on this thread.
Posted: 26 04 2009 - 07:57 | Permanent link to this comment