European survey of mothers

Click here to take part in a survey organised by a like-minded Belgian organisation.

If you are a mother and live in Europe then do take part in the “Great European Survey of Mothers” commissioned by the European branch of the World Movement of Mothers 

This is a unique opportunity to talk about your circumstances as a mother and to have a real impact on future European and national policies that affect family wellbeing.

 This survey will take up about 15 minutes of your time and may be accessed in 8 languages. It is strictly anonymous and confidential. Your experience counts.

Waiting for a (second) baby

Here’s a contribution from one of our members. She says that this might be more of an issue when you’ve given up work to be with a child and then you feel you might only have the one (“although I know of people desperate for a second child to have more maternity leave!”)

Blunt words from FTM patron

Click here for presentations by Oliver James, author and patron of Full Time Mothers, at  Waterstone’s. These included the following hard-hitting lines:

‘for the rich there are au pairs,  for the poor it’s more or less crap group daycare..the evidence for group daycare is unequivocable’  (he quotes Jay Belsky – may be a ’small’ negative effect he says  but it affects an awful  lot of children)……’you get children’s clubs for terribly long days – for five, six, seven year olds who are absolutely [exhausted]

Death of the family supper

This article in the Daily Telegraph says that fewer families eat together because there are more parents in paid employment outside the home.

Never mind: the next step in the state taking over the family will be launching of  tax-payer funded ‘dinner clubs’ to complement ‘breakfast clubs’ and ‘homework clubs’. When will we see ’sleeping clubs’? You heard it here first.

Remember, the state will finance anyone to provide child care – as long as it isn’t the children’s own parents.

Liberated women

The following tongue-in-cheek was a Comment on this Guardian article:

The women in my street have been liberated too. Two of them work as care assistants and the other in the laundry of the local mental hospital.

Maternal Affairs: Back to square mum

This article in the Times looks at the experiences of mothers looking after their own children, their jobs having been made redundant.

Parents too busy to help children learn to talk, expert suggests

This Guardian article includes the following from an education psychologist:

while a proportion of children had always had speech problems there was anecdotal evidence of an increase in difficulties caused by social factors such as the amount of time they spent “exposed to screens of all kinds” and lack of time with their parents for face-to-face conversation.

“It’s money – mortgages,” she said. “People would feel able to share childcare or spend more time at home with their children if they didn’t have to pay such astronomically high mortgages.

The psychologist cites high house prices forcing parents to work. She could also have mentioned the additional pressure of support for non-parental childcare. If such funds were transferred to increased child benefit then parents would be able to see more of their children.

Investing in children

The latest issue of The Economist carries this leader article on ‘Women and work’ (note the Orwellian tactic of redefining words to change how we think – here, ‘work’ means paid employment outside the home).

The article includes the following:

And, without going to Scandinavian lengths, America could invest more in its children: it spends a lower share of its GDP on public child-care than almost any other rich country,

So, according to The Economist – paying anyone other than parents to look after their children is to “invest… in children”. Really?

It might be if the parents are unable or unwilling to look after their own children – and the latter is blackmail: ”We’ll harm our children – albeit in subtle ways – unless you give us money”. As for children who would indeed be better off kept away from their natural parents: there are already laws in place that allow children to be taken from the family home and ‘put into ‘care’.

Top Ballerina happy to be “Full Time Mother”

In this BBC interview, Darcey Bussell – the Royal Ballet’s youngest ever principal ballerina and now retired and looking after her children - says, “being a full-time mother was something I always wanted to do”.

Families to keep £2,400 in childcare vouchers after Gordon Brown’s U-turn

So says the Telegraph headline to this story.

But this isn’t all families. Oh no. It’s only those families that choose to outsource their childcare.