We give birth to a bag of guilt in the hospital without fully understanding the gargantuan responsibility we’re about to undertake.
We take six months off to be with our babies and then it’s seen as essential to turf our offspring into childcare without completely realising the risks involved.
We say it’s the only way, that we need to work to pay the bills, that we have no choice.
But we always have a choice – surely if we cut our cloth and take a hit by staying at home to mind our precious babies we are investing in what’s truly important.
Our careers can wait, the world will keep turning.
Work will come and go but minding our babies when they need us most is a short-lived blip in their lifetime.
In my mum’s day, it was normal for women to give up their career to raise their kids.
Fast-forward a few decades and we’ve got our emancipation, we can have it all, work like dogs and go home to the kids, where the real work begins.
Why bother having kids if all we are going to do is hand them over for someone else to bring up?
This week it emerged that roughly one-in-four creches across the State have been classified as “high risk” by the Child and Family Agency Tusla.
Most of these are in Dublin and it’s shocking that we entrust these places to rear our kids.
Tusla has three main categories of risk: high, medium and low.
“High-risk” primarily arises because services have repeatedly breached important childcare regulations.
These include not having appropriate Garda vetting in place for carers working with children, inadequate staff numbers and a failure to maintain required adult-to-child ratios.
Creches are packed to the brim with kids all fighting for space and while we go off and work to pay extortionate creche fees who is suffering? Our children.
When RTE broke the story that the Hyde And Seek creches in Dublin were poorly-run with a shocking portrayal of milk being watered down and babies forced to sleep in cots rammed together, we were horrified.
But this is only the beginning of the revelations that will emerge – there are too many babies crammed into rooms with over- worked creche workers earning pittance, as the insurance firms continue to overcharge.
The sad reality is if a care worker is stretched with more than three babies to look after, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be risky situations.
How can we be sure that our children are not being mistreated in these veritable institutions where your child is just a number?
I’m lucky enough that I can divide minding our kids between myself and my partner, but it’s common knowledge that it’s far easier to go to work.
Working at home is the true making of a human.
We don’t like to say it but minding small children can feel like drudgery – it’s relentless, you feel like a slave and the only break for many parents is when they go to work.
But at what cost?
The Finns have it right – once the baby is born, Finland gives mothers about four months of paid maternity leave and fathers a little more than two months of paid leave.
Even after the parental leave period ends, one parent has the right to stay home, and get “paid” €450 a month and return to the same job until the child is three years old.
We need to think outside the box if we are going to bring up the next generation in a just and loving way.
Kids need their mothers and fathers – yes there are creche workers who adore children, who are vocated to the role, but for them it’s a job.
Nobody is going to care for your child like you do.
You need a licence to have a dog but anyone can have a child, and if we are simply going to fob our kids off on someone else to mind, what’s the point in having them in the first place?
