The UK has not had above-replacement fertility – an average of 2.1 children per woman – since 1973. At the same time, the drive towards greater sexual equality has resulted in more women entering the workplace. In his book The Care Dilemma, the journalist David Goodhart argues that advances in individual freedom have had unintended consequences on family life. As women have fewer children and spend more time working outside the home, the realm of care – for both young children and the elderly – has suffered. The solution, he says, is not “to push back against equality but… raising the status and value of the traditionally female realms of care”.
In the last third of his book, Goodhart sets out compassionately and pragmatically a number of policies that might help improve the social care sector. He suggests that the government should create a social care CEO who can advocate on the sector’s behalf. Carers need to be better respected: along with nurses, they aren’t paid enough, he argues. Nurses who stay in the NHS for five years should have some of their student debt forgiven and the rest of it wiped out after a decade. The recruitment crisis in caring is one of four “big trends” that Goodhart argues are symptoms of “our current malaise”: the less stable family, the mental fragility epidemic among young people, and the rapidly falling birth rate are the others.
Although much of the solutions-focused part of the book is sensible, I was exasperated by the time I reached it. Goodhart claims he advocates for “more support for stay-at-home parents as well as making it easier to combine parenting and work”, but the preceding 200 pages felt like an exercise in blaming women, professional middle-class mothers in particular. This group are the main users of formal paid-for childcare, which Goodhart argues the government should cease to subsidise at current rates; the concerns of these women, he writes, “tend to dominate public policy on these issues”. I am one such woman, so I’ll accept I may not be impartial – but I’m not sure working mothers are as all-powerful as he implies. At one point it is suggested that women’s “greater weight” in politics and society and their “stronger impulse to avoid harm” may have played a role in the “dramatic lockdown response to the pandemic”. This is baffling, particularly as it has emerged that women were almost entirely absent from the government’s decision-making during this period.
It is difficult not to feel frustrated – outraged even – at some of the assumptions made about single parenting or women’s relationship to sex. The “pill-driven shift in norms”, it’s claimed, has helped “tilt society further in the direction of the hook-up culture and away from the harder-won happiness of committed relationships”. “Family instability” has exacerbated the epidemic of “mental fragility” in young people. The evidence presented here is correlation, not causation. Frightening figures are put forward arguing that children whose parents are married fare much better than both those raised by a single parent, or those whose parents are unmarried. But we also learn that it is the “affluent and better educated… who have generally stuck with the institution of marriage”. Might income be a key factor in the happiness of children? (Goodhart acknowledges later tsociahat “poverty can also, of course, be a cause of family instability”.)
Goodhart cites “Critical Science, an influential website” as the source of the claim “that [30 hours or more a week] in daycare has about two-thirds the negative effect on behaviour as having ‘a moderately depressed mother’”. As far as I can find, Critical Science is the username of a contributor to the Medium blog website, and has 304 followers. The claim cited by Goodhart comes from a US research paper published in 2005 – nearly 20 years ago. Goodhart is right that “saving the feelings of parents who have used nurseries from a young age is a bad reason not to investigate the cohort-wide outcomes of the childcare experiment with an open mind”, but this does not seem to be his approach.
An academic premised her comments on an earlier draft of Goodhart’s book by saying, “There is a really loud dog-whistle that women should go back to hearth and home.” He claims this is not his belief, though as a man he is “bound to attract such comments”. Perhaps. But the implication throughout is that progress towards gender equality has ruined children’s mental health, led to neglect of the elderly, and degraded the fabric of society.
There’s a lack of empathy for women juggling work and parenthood. When talking about the difficulty working mums face, Goodhart identifies “an element of ‘first-world problems’ about some of these complaints from the group that has done better, relatively speaking, than any other in Western societies in the last couple of decades: middle-class graduate women… The many women who have grasped the opportunity to combine motherhood and career surely understand that it will be more stressful than doing just one or the other.”
At times, I wondered whether Goodhart and I live in parallel universes. “The absence of parents with young children in the streets, parks and playgrounds, looking out for older people and each other, represents a real, but hard to quantify, loss to community life in many places,” he writes. The playgrounds bustle with families where I live. Goodhart suggests nurseries are weighed down by “highly prescriptive” targets and learning requirements, and are devoid of cuddles. Perhaps he hasn’t visited a nursery recently. The one my youngest child attends provides kindness, fun – and cuddles.
“What about men?” Goodhart asks. In high-income countries, men now do around 40 per cent of all the unpaid work in the home, he states. Yet some men feel emasculated because women have taken their jobs and don’t want to settle down with them. “There is some evidence,” he writes, “of higher divorce rates, more domestic abuse and less satisfactory sexual relations in households where women out-earn men.” No evidence is actually provided. But it’s hard not to read this as a rebuke to successful women.
Some of Goodhart’s policy suggestions are sound: grandparents who help with childcare should be eligible for a carer’s allowance, and both maternity and paternity pay should be increased. But I remain unconvinced that parents can be bribed into having more children and staying at home for longer. Goodhart’s combination of policies would ultimately reward a married couple £10,000 per year for their first child. He argues that, when asked, women say they want more children than they end up having. But as Goodhart employs the device of “someone I know” throughout the book, I will do the same. I know plenty of women who could afford to have another baby – they just don’t want one. They adore their children, but their bodies have had enough, and they see themselves as grown-up women as well as mothers.
The UK’s falling fertility rate and crisis in care need to be talked about. These problems are not going away, and for bringing them to a wider audience Goodhart should be applauded. His diagnosis, however, is flawed and subjective, and many of his prescriptions would not have enough support from those who will inevitably face the highest burden: women.
The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality
David Goodhart
Forum, 256pp, £25
Note: This article was amended on 25 October 2024. The article initially said that the author does not cite a source for the claim that men do around 40 per cent of unpaid work in the home. The book provides the source for this figure as: “Oriel Sullivan and Evrim Altintas, ‘Chapter 5: Dividing Domestic Labour and Care’, in Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan, ‘What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research’ (Pelican, 2019), 105-128.”
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[See also: Malcolm Gladwell’s cult of smartness]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate