We need to sustain all parents but our society does not recognise parenting as work, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
EVERYTHING CHANGES when you have a child. It is the most challenging, the most exhausting, the scariest and the most rewarding thing that most adults will ever do. The centre of gravity shifts. After becoming a parent, everything, including one's own mortality, is viewed through the lens of the impact it will have on these small and utterly dependent beings. Cases like Baby P in Britain are so shocking because they violate our most basic instincts to protect and nourish the young.
That's how parents think. In recent times, it does not appear to be the way that the State thinks. It looks at lone parents and thinks of how to cut the social welfare bill. It looks at classrooms and figures out how to squeeze in, say, an extra half-dozen children. It looks at climate change, which will impact most severely on our children and our children's children, and says, "Not yet. We'll tackle it someday, but not yet."
The recent hints that compulsion to go out to work will be introduced for lone parents should make us all pause.
There has been a change in the debate about families in recent times. For the first time in decades, we hear that marriage is the "gold standard" for rearing children, with the phrase being used by everyone from Geoffrey Shannon, the family law expert, to Maureen Gaffney, the psychologist. At the same time, there is a pragmatic recognition that life is messy, and when people end up in other situations, they need support, not condemnation.
"Lone parent" is a strange term. No one becomes a parent alone. Even when conception is by sperm or egg donation, there is a genetic, social and cultural history, not to mention a biological father or mother out there somewhere. In most situations, what you have is not "lone parenting" or even "single parenting", but one parent shouldering more of the responsibility, and the other taking at least some interest.
How ironic it would be to denigrate anyone who takes responsibility and does her or his best to rear a child well. How important it is to support parents in order to share responsibility fairly, and to encourage wherever possible that people put aside personal differences in order to act in the interests of the children.
Supporting marriage, and aiming to have as many children as possible reared in stable marriages, does not preclude support for people who are parenting separately. Rather, the opposite is true. Being a mother or father is difficult enough when you have the full support of a spouse. The reason that people parenting separately need extra support is because the job is extra difficult.
In my experience, most people parenting alone do not do so as a lifestyle choice and most would say that of course they would prefer to be in a happy marriage. They are grimly aware of the negative statistics for children in these situations and they do their damnedest to prevent their own child being one of those statistics. They cannot do so without the support of the wider society. Pitting married parents against people parenting alone helps no one. In fact, all parents, whether married or single, are under pressure, and all need help.
Our society does not really recognise parenting as work. Oh, it pays lip service to it, but in reality believes that the only work that counts is work that brings home a pay cheque. Our State introduced tax individualisation, which means that married families where only one parent works outside the home are taxed more heavily than where neither parent is engaged in full-time parenting. It is the same lack of regard for the importance of mothers and fathers that is driving the move to compel people parenting separately or alone to go out into the workplace.
It is not as if lone parents want to live in poverty and need some kind of stick to beat them into the workforce. Recent research launched by One Family shows that people parenting alone want to work, or improve their prospects through education.
Like any parent, they don't want to do that at the expense of taking proper care of their children.
Every child is different. Some cope well with parents working, and some need full-time care for much longer. In fact, it is more crucial sometimes to have a parent at home in the teenage years to help them to navigate the dramatic shifts in identity that occur.
Parents don't need compulsion to make them want to work. They need help to make it possible to juggle parenting and paid work. They need decent housing, because those on rent supplement are least likely to be working and most likely to be in poverty.
People parenting alone are not a homogeneous group. The ones most at risk of long-term poverty are those who are disadvantaged to start with. It is not rocket science that people with better education and housing have better prospects for waged work.
Yet again, the impact of the failure to fund education properly for decades is being felt. Eighteen per cent of those in receipt of the one parent family payment (OFP) have no educational qualifications, and another 15 per cent have literacy or numeracy difficulties. A mother with low or no educational qualifications will only find work that is low-paid and stressful.
We bewail the loss of values like empathy and solidarity in our society, but utterly fail to recognise the key role that mothers and fathers play in passing on those values. As a society, we need to sustain all parents. Parenting support and mentoring is particularly important for those parenting alone or in shared parenting situations.
The last thing we need is compulsion for parents to go out to work before their children are ready, and to put their already vulnerable families at further risk.