You go for it. Every little girl's dream, or so you're told. You manage somehow to complete a gravity-defying pregnancy test involving body fluids, a thin blue line and a complicated balancing act in the bathroom. Seven months later, someone is kicking you in the kidneys. Motherhood.
Your worst fear as a parent, mother or father, is that your child will be injured or abused when you're not around to protect them. Your next worst fear is that your paid childcare may not be good enough. Trusting your childcare provider is like trusting your partner. If you don't make that act of faith, you'll drive yourself mad.
Some Limerick parents had their second worst fears confirmed when the case of the Jolly Tots creche hit the courts. A determined Mid-Western Health Board nurse, Helen Rouine, collected evidence of so many breaches of the regulations that the judge called the proprietor's attitude "appalling".
Dirty nappies lying round, infants at risk of choking or starving because no one cut up their meat for them, babies deprived of enough supervision to thrive - some left without any supervision at all. "Appalling" is one word for the sheer disrespect to the children there. "Inevitable" may be another.
Nurse Rouine's professionalism and her health board's determination to prosecute the case makes an example of Deirdre McLoughlin, the proprietor, and puts muscle on the 1996 childcare regulations just in time for Mother's Dayy. But it does not follow that mothers will now feel any easier putting their faith in the system.
THE specific breaches mentioned in the Jolly Tots case offer a parable of what can follow from the government's insistence on pursuing a childcare strategy based almost exclusively on market economics and on insufferably narrow ideas of where that childcare can take place.
Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney have trumpeted repeatedly the notion that childcare is an industry that can develop along more or less the same lines as any other, and to the same end - profit. It appears Deirdre McLoughlin took them at their word.
The profit-directed industrial model of childcare makes the provider a potential entrepreneur, and fosters the idea of parents as consumers whose choices drive the industry along. So far, so good. Except caring for children doesn't work this way, as the Jolly Tots saga confirms.
In other "industries", the demand for products or services drives the market because businesses can compete with each other for the consumer's cash. Profit derives from getting the balance right between running costs and what the consumer can be persuaded to pay.
Every offence listed in the Jolly Tots case is a direct consequence of putting profit first. The creche was cold because there was no oil for the heating; it was understaffed because the wages were not high enough; the children's diet was restricted because a good diet costs money.
None of these factors excuses Deirdre McLoughlin's failure to honour her responsibility to the parents who trusted her. Apart from breaching the regulations, she operated outside her own professional conventions, as articulated by various national organisations.
THE Government's policy on childcare runs on the premise that market forces will solve the childcare crisis. Treat children as products, with parents as consumers, and over time an affordable, accessible infrastructure will evolve. Slot childcare into that model and you end up with the costequivalent of a luxury service. Children whose parents can pay will get a decent service.
Common sense tells us choosing childcare is unlike choosing any other service. For a start, it is not discretionary. The preferred industrial template breaks down when you bear in mind that the average cost of the official product - one child cared for full-time in an Irish creche - is now well in excess of £100 a week. The average industrial earnings of a mother in full-time employment, the more typical consumer, are little more than double that amount, before tax.
The facts indicate that working parents have little if any consumer power in deciding the kind of childcare in which they place their children. And the Government colludes in their powerlessness by denying them the financial resources to become the kind of consumers their children need them to be. Luxury care is their birthright.
Deirdre McLoughlin could have cared for children within the informal, unregulated, economy, as most carers do. But the only available childcare model that fits the Government's industrial template is the creche.
Other consumer-driven ways of caring for children are excluded from support and regulation. No universal payment is available to help parents who want to work in the home, or have their children cared for by another person at home. No tax break is offered for parents who are happy having their child cared for by a friend or neighbour.
The wonder of this scenario is that many more creche providers don't fall into the same trap as Deirdre McLoughlin. Profit alone doesn't govern all.
mruane@irish-times.ie