Pros And Cons Of Non Parental Care
Arguments for Non-Parental Care for Children
Shakeda McRoberts
Online Juvenile Delinquency
Due: 9/1/2013
Arguments for non-parental care for children
Abstract: I reviewed three existing arguments in favour of having some childcare done by none. My arguments are the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. It is imperative of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children’s structural vulnerability to their care-givers, of helping children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship, and of distributing the responsibility of care and the ensuing blame …show more content…
for bad care more widely. I conclude that non-parental childcare should be universal. The value of non-parental childcare is a widely debated issue. Although in many contemporary societies most children are exposed to some non-parental care carried out either in various institutions or by nannies, friends and extended families, people disagree about its benefits – especially for preschool children – and few believe there is a duty to ensure that all children are exposed to it. The law usually allows parents to exclude children of preschool age from non-parental care and, where homeschooling is allowed, non-parental care can be avoided for much longer. Here, I criticize the still widespread conviction that there is nothing wrong in confining childcare to parents. Moreover, I argue that there is a duty to ensure that care for all children older than one is shared between parents.
2 People who come into children’s lives as strangers but who are prepared and willing to develop caring relationships with them. By ‘parents’ I mean the primary figures in children’s lives, who take the moral and legal responsibility for caring continuously for children until they reach maturity. By ‘non- parental care’ I refer to care given by people who are not the parents of the children for whom they care but who may be other children’s parents. I outline three arguments already present in the literature on childcare and then introduce five more arguments that discuss the value of exposing all children older than one to some non-parental care. Some of the arguments are based on the wellbeing of children and/or parents, others on fairness (towards children and/or parents, and towards mothers) and some on both wellbeing and fairness. The sixth argument concludes that non-parental childcare is a matter of duty towards children resulting from their dependence on caregivers. While some of the arguments show that non-parental care is highly desirable, others have the more radical implication that excluding children from non-parental care is morally wrong, with the ultimate conclusion being that parents do not have the right to exclude their children from non-parental care. Although there are different grounds for the different arguments I discuss – wellbeing, fairness and duty – I hope that, taken together, they support each other in making the case for a system of universal, compulsory and state-regulated childcare similar to the2
The parents may be biological or not, single or partnered, married (to each other) or not, gay or heterosexual; I do not discuss how different types of family may impact on childrearing. The only assumption I make is that children need to have at least one adult committed to providing continuous care and thus serving as a primary figure, and that societies should ensure that this need is met.3 Arguments four, seven and eight rely on feminist work on the various ways in which child carers can fail to give adequate care. Robert Goodin, on whose theory of vulnerability I ground the sixth argument, has written himself about family relationships and childrearing.
Protecting the Vulnerable
This argument rests on the importance of fairness towards children, on the endemic nature of mistakes in care and on children’s vulnerability to failed care, I shall not consider the more radical possibilities of addressing these issues by either abolishing the family and raising children in well-run orphanages or by instituting a parenting license scheme. Instead, I start from the assumption that parenting as we know it5is valuable and worth preserving, as long as parents do not do all the childcare. The effects of non-parental care, and especially of institutional care6, on children have an important bearing on their overall desirability. It is difficult to assess the evidence, not only because some the available data are contradictory (and often research on childcare is ideologically driven), but also because much of the existing institutional childcare is deficient and thus adequate empirical evidence is very difficult to gather. These difficulties aside, after a thorough assessment of the literature on childcare in the U.S., Jane Waldfogel has recently concluded that, while non-parental childcare during their first year might be harmful to children, non-parental care of children after their first year appears to be neutral or even beneficial. Obviously, non-parental care must meet certain minimal criteria. Based on recent research on the effects of institutional childcare, Daniel Engster
I think children’s need for a continuous and highly personalized bond of care, and the importance adults place on parenting rule out the universal orphanage option.
I believe the intrusion into people’s privacy involved in a licensing scheme would be exceedingly damaging to individual freedom and to interpersonal relationships.
Social Theory and Practice
That is, a practice that involves one or several adults being the main care-givers of their children, whom they have come to parent sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident. Many societies have histories of particularly bad institutional care. In these cases, people have the understandable perception that care given in institutional settings is necessarily inferior to family care and often unacceptably bad.
What Children Need
Non-parental childcare arrangements are not harmful for most children as long as they meet various quality measures including:
a. low adult-child ratios, adequate levels of caregiver training, staff stability and decent physical facilities. The precise content of desirable non-parental care will vary with children’s individual needs, which are partially determined by age. In practice, exposing all children older than one to some non-parental care could mean, for example, that they spend a few hours every day in childcare institutions. Non-parental care can take the form of day care for infants, kindergartens for preschool children and school and after-school activities for older children.
I. Non-parental care and justice
The discussion of universal non-parental care involves three distinct, yet very closely related questions. Only the first of these are about the value of non-parental care is fully addressed in this article. The other two questions are, Should non-parental care necessarily be provided by professionally trained people and, if so, should it be provided in state-regulated institutions or in private settings? and, who should bear its costs: parents, society, or a combination of both? While I cannot engage at length with the last two questions, some of the arguments I discuss suggest that non- parental care should be provided by professional caregivers in state-regulated institutions. In the context of establishing whether justice requires universal non-parental care, the more difficult question is whether the costs of childcare should be at least partly borne by society.
There are several reasons why the costs of childrearing should be (at least) to some extent socialized. Engster (2007)takes the fact that we, as children, have all appealed to other people’s care to be a ground for a universal duty of care towards whoever needs it, including (other people’s) children. In her book
Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family
(Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 2008) Nancy Folbre argues that parents and non- parents should share the costs of childrearing because children are akin to ‘public goods’ – having children is necessary for social survival. I engage later in this article with Ann Alstott’s argument that, since raising children is
5are highly disputed10 and it is beyond the scope of this paper to make the case in favour of this position. For those not convinced that justice requires us to share the costs of childcare, arguments three, seven and eight will be arguments about parental wellbeing rather than arguments concerning fairness towards parents. Most arguments will however be unaffected by the answer to the question whether childless people should bear the costs of non-parental care. State-regulated childcare institutions, or other forms of organized non-parental care, could be funded by parents only, for example through a tax non-payable by childless people. In this paper, I remain agnostic on this issue, but I point out its relevance for particular arguments. I assume there are several, sometimes divergent, considerations that determine what is, overall, just; these include fairness, needs, rights, duties and utility11. The relevant considerations for judging that universal non-parental care is just which I discuss here are children’s and parents’ needs, fairness and a general duty to protect children for unacceptable forms of dependency. I believe that, taken together, these arguments show that parents do not have the moral right to exclude their children from non-parental care. All the reasons I discuss in section four indicate that non-parental care advances the well-being of both children and parents by meeting some of their needs. This claim would not, on its own, make the case that non-parental care is required by justice, given the widely accepted belief that parents are free to decide what is best for themselves and, with qualifications, for their children. This is particularly true when non-parental care is one of several possibilities available to meet particular needs, as in some of the cases I discuss. A second consideration, prominent in the present article, is fairness: different arguments show that non-parental care would advance fairness towards children, and such resource-intensive activity in terms of time, economic resources and emotional involvement, it is unfair that parents should shoulder these costs alone.
The fairness towards parents/mothers claim depends, however, on how one answers the above question about sharing the costs of childcare. Fairness towards parents alone would not mean that non-parental care should be universal and mandatory since parents may waive their claim to fair treatment – but rather that it should be easily available to all children, possibly at general expense. Therefore, the most important of the fairness-based arguments is that fairness requires us to spread the risk, and limit the damage, that failed care entails for children. If true, this is a strong reason to ensure that all children receive some non-parental care. In spite of the importance we place on fairness, however, sometimes we think that what is fair does not always coincide with what is just. In the case of childcare, some individual prerogatives, such as parental rights, might limit the pursuit of fairness. To meet this objection, I advance an additional argument: I argue that children’s depends on their caregivers and the inherently asymmetrical and unequal relationships between children and caregivers generate a duty to diversify caregivers. Even if all parents were able to provide sufficient care, we would still have a duty to expose all children to some non-parental care as a way of avoiding monopolies of care and limiting children’s vulnerability to any of their care-givers. I conclude that parental rights should be limited by a general duty to ensure that children do not depend too much on their parents’ hands-on care. Being required by justice, universal non-parental care is, as such, mandatory. Implementation should, however, proceed very carefully.
Societies vary widely in their ability to provide adequate non- parental care for all children, and in the levels of parental opposition to non-parental care.
It is possible that, in some cases, making non-parental care mandatory may do more damage than good, since care provided in inadequate conditions can harm children. When the organization of universal, adequate non-parental care is unfeasible due to lack of resources, finding the necessary resources, including children with special needs, for whom adequate non-parental care might involve much higher expense, should become a political priority. When parental opposition to mandatory non-parental care risk introducing harmful disruptions into children’s lives, we should not simply accept this opposition but try to persuade parents. For this reason, it is important that arguments which show that non-parental care is a matter of fairness and duty be accompanied by arguments which show that it advances children’s and parents’ wellbeing. In my paper some of these arguments are based on children’s and parents’ needs. A fundamental normative assumption I make is that fair societies ensure that everybody’s essential needs are met. Moreover, when the satisfaction of needs impacts on people’s (often comparative) opportunities to lead good lives, need and fairness point in the same direction, providing all the more reason to ensure that needs are properly addressed. Children are dependent on adults’ care if their needs for security, nourishment, hygiene, affection, socialization and basic education are to be met. …show more content…
Since it shapes their bodies, personalities and various abilities, the care they receive is crucial in determining their opportunities, both as children and as future adults. Parents, in turn, have their own needs, which mean they should also be cared for, but, as adults, they are less dependent than children are. A salient need of parents, which is seriously frustrated when childcare cannot be shared, is for time. Parents need some time free from the responsibility of caring for children if they are to have proper rest and the opportunity to pursue any other projects of their own. Equally important, parents as well as children need the responsibility for childcare to be divided among several persons in order to better manage the ambivalent14feelings that permeate ordinary parent-child relationships. The issue of caring for children very imperative/important. Raising children the right way will make the world a better place. I work with the assumption that both children and parents experience ambivalent feelings towards each other, which is a widely accepted thesis, based on clinical experience, in object-relation theory. By ambivalence I mean that the love that binds most parents and children is inevitably accompanied by anger, frustration and, occasionally, even hatred.
still carried out by women. I agree with the vast feminist literature that explains why this is unfair to women and possibly bad for all involved. The claim defended here, that some childcare should be done by non-parents, is backed by reasons of gender fairness. Feminists have long argued that care work should be shared between women and men. One obvious way to achieve this is through a redistribution of care work between mothers and fathers, a proposal to which I am fully sympathetic. However, where attempts to encourage fathers (through regulated paternal leave, for instance) to participate in more hands-on care for their children are relatively unsuccessful, institutional care is an alternative context in which men can be encouraged to carry out some of the childcare. It is likely that childcare will attract more men who are inclined to care for children (but who do not have the proper incentives to do so under the current social organization of care) if social norms require that some of it would be provided in adequate institutions, it would be given a higher status than it currently has, and its quality would be acknowledged as a matter of common responsibility, because the social organization of care is deeply gendered, the conflicts between the needs of children and those of caregivers often take the form of conflicts between children’s and mothers’ needs. Since the wellbeing of mothers and children are so deeply intertwined, it is tempting to ignore these conflicts, conflate children’s and mothers’ needs, and perhaps retreat into an idealized – and ideological – representation of selfless motherhood. The idealization of motherhood, often encountered in popular culture and even in mainstream psychotherapy, obliterates those needs and interests of As such this would of course not resolve the issues of gender justice within individual heterosexual couples. But if it is true that some sources of widespread sexist attitudes reside in children’s lack of experience of caring men, then institutional care provided by men who are presumably qualified, and willing to care will go some way towards a more gender-fair society. See, for instance, Jessica Benjamin Research on childcare work and gender suggests that low pay is the main disincentive for men to seek and retain employment as childcare workers, especially given an enduring expectation that men be the primary breadwinners.
The Capacity to Care.
Mothers which do not serve children’s own interests. I hope to avoid this idealization without falling for the complementary one, namely the presupposition that whatever advances mothers’ needs should necessarily serve children’s interests. Instead, I assume that a fair society will seek institutional arrangements that minimize rather than exacerbate the conflict between mothers’/parents’ and children’s needs, even if this is expensive. Suppose, for example, that a society without adequate institutional care were to sharpen the conflicts between mothers’/parents’ need to pursue their professional life and children’s needs for care. Also suppose that organizing institutional childcare of an adequate standard was a more expensive option than leaving it entirely up to individual families. I assume that, other things being equal, fairness is a reason to choose the institutional arrangement that is more expensive but which makes it more likely that neither mothers’/parents’ nor children’s needs will be extensively sacrificed. This last claim might be unconvincing for those who believe that it is fair that parents support the full cost of childrearing; but the overall argument of this paper is supported, rather than dependent, on this claim.
II. Existing arguments for non-parental care
The recent literature on social equality, family and gender offers several, not always fully explicit, reasons for part of the childcare being provided by non-parents. To my knowledge these reasons have not yet been presented together in a systematic argument. Common to all these approaches is a relatively unproblematic perspective on quality of care issues. They assume parental care is essential if children are to develop into autonomous, properly socialized adults who can form and pursue life plans of their own care is thus a primary good.
I can see two different reasons for this. A general reason is that in a just society everyone’s basic needs will be taken into consideration, and needs for work and pursuing individual projects, as well as needs for care, are indeed basic. A second, special reason is that mothers’/parents’ needs are not as independent from those of their children as are the needs of unrelated adults. There also seems to be a special kind of moral harm in social arrangements that the needs of mothers/parents and children if alternative arrangements are available, when this happens, frustrating the needs of each party involves frustrating the needs of the other party as well.
The fact that children grow up in families poses a serious challenge to fairness, families are sites of very unequal distributions of important goods, such as education and socialization. Not only do children share their parents’ material condition, but they also spontaneously inherit much of their parents’ way of speaking the language, interests in various pursuits, habits and social relationships. Class, power, social status and education are being passed on from one generation to the next within families. Even in the absence of crass social inequalities, parents’ freedom to raise their children according to their own values, which is recognized and protected by liberal regimes, means that parents’ impact on their children’s wellbeing and future opportunities is very significant. While there are good reasons for protecting this freedom, there is a strong case for providing some non-parental childcare in order to level the playing field and mitigate, if not eliminate, some of the above-mentioned inequalities. Barbara Bergmann, for instance, argued that if some care takes place outside the family, in daycare centers, kindergartens, and schools, children are given the chance to catch up on whatever they might miss at home in terms of education, social relations, and exposure to various values and lifestyles. The more egalitarian these institutions will be, the better they will counterbalance home-inherited inequalities. There are some non-parental care draws on the fact that care can easily fail. There are of course many other reasons why non-parental care is beneficial.
ManMaMany people assume that publicly funded, state-regulated institutions are more likely to be egalitarian than market-run caring arrangements.
This does not necessarily mean that the costs of childrearing must be shared between parents and childless people since the necessary public funds may come from taxes paid only by parents. On this account, universal non-parental care would rectify, or prevent the accumulation of, pre-existing unfair inequalities. It is very urgent to be aware of the risk that particular arrangements of non-parental care might perpetuate, or exacerbate, various social divisions, including class and economic ones, in a similar way to that in which public schools have been criticized for doing so. This is more likely if parents are allowed to choose the institution their child will attend, or if children attend local care institutions in class-segregated neighborhoods. If such obstacles are not insuperable, the conclusion of this argument is that fairness towards children demands the provision of universal on-parental care. Making the non-exit commitment lighter a second somewhat symmetrical argument based on distributive justice takes parents’ wellbeing and opportunities as grounds for the provision of some care outside the home. Parents commitment for the care of their children involves serious costs in terms of time, economic opportunities and personal
autonomy.
School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent
(Routledge, 2003) and Brighouse and Swift (2006; 2009) argue, much of the parental care that results in social and economic opportunities for children consists of inconspicuous, everyday actions, such as reading bedtime stories to one’s child. Even in an egalitarian society people will presumably have different ways of parenting, leading to unequal opportunities for their children. Because choosing particular lifestyles that parents share with their childrenhas intrinsic, and significant, value (Brighouse and Swift, 2006) we would not want to eliminate all such differences. We would have reason to organize some institutional care to offset the inequality-inducing effects of the family, even in an egalitarian society.
I agree with Brighouse and Swift of the make a ‘no exit’ commitment, which means making a commitment from which one cannot and should not depart lightly)to give significant weight to their children’s interests, often putting them before their own interests, and indeed to shape their own lives such that their children’s lives go well. Children’s need for continuity in care means this commitment extends over many years, hence it represents a very significant opportunity cost to parents. This cost can be high enough to endanger parents’ autonomy. Furthermore, having children is no longer in modern societies a source of economic benefit or an insurance that one will be cared for when ill or old. Thus parents’ commitment to their children is nowadays more demanding than it has ever been, since it involves high costs and no material benefits. According to Alstott, while it is fair that parents shoulder much of the cost of rearing their children, since they have freely decided to parent , it is also fair that parents be given social support to offset some of the cost of their commitment and to protect their autonomy. Alstott suggests the introduction of a caretaker resource account for parents in the form of money to be used for childcare, parents’ own education or retirement. Although Alstott herself does not propose this, ensuring that all parents have access to child care would reduce the burden of the ‘no exit’ commitment, by redistributing to parents one of the resources they are often most short of: time26. In this case childcare would have to be funded through universal taxation, since its aim is to redistribute some of the costs of childcare from parents to the wider society. Thus, depending on the answer to the question of who should support the costs of childcare, this is either an argument based on fairness towards parents or, at least, an argument concluding that universal childcare would be conducive to parents’ wellbeing by meeting their need for time. According to the non-exit argument, non-parental care is merely one of the several alternative ways in which parental commitment could and should be made lighter, but people who decide to parent will continue to support much of the cost of parenting themselves.
I will argue that non-parental care is the only way of reducing the burden of guilt which often comes with parenting. Advancing gender justice third reason for having some non-parental care is grounded in gender fairness. In all societies mothers bear the costs of childrearing disproportionately, forsaking career opportunities, education and personal development to a much larger extent than men.
Women often miss out on opportunities because they are constantly occupied with most of the hands-on care for their children due to a combination of lack of choice and an ideology of the ever-present mother. If all childcare is to be provided by parents, then at least one of the parents must forsake the opportunity to work full-time. Given the current structure of the labour market, working part-time comes with significant penalties in terms of income, benefits, intrinsic quality of work and, very significantly, in terms of future prospects for good jobs and financial security in case of divorce. In practice, it is largely mothers’ who work part-time in order to raise children. If provisions were made for parents regularly to leave their children in the adequate care of other people, they would have better opportunities to organize their work and family life in gender-egalitarian ways. Moreover, shifting some care work away from mothers, especially if this takes the form of professional care that involves men as well as women, will give care more social recognition. Since working part-time often makes it less likely that one will be assigned interesting, challenging, and intrinsically rewarding tasks, or that one will have the same degree of autonomy and control over one’s work as full-time workers.
Caring for the children and house hold duties has been traditionally considered a female occupation since the beginning of time, this will in turn improve women’s social standing, assuming that the majority of care work will continue to be done by women. If the non- parental care is provided in well-resourced institutions, the recognition gains for the caring occupations will arguably be even more significant. This argument appeals to gender fairness: it shows that non-parental care is required because itrectifies (a) the disproportionate way in which mothers miss opportunities, and (b) the low social recognition attached to care-giving as women’s work. Both the first and the third arguments presuppose pre-existing forms of unfairness and, as such, are vulnerable to the objection that it would be better to eliminate unfairness directly rather than mitigate its consequences through non-parental childcare. In the rest of this paper I show that thereremain reasons of fairness (as well as other reasons) for having universal non-parental care even in an economically and gender fair society.
III. Inevitable failings of care
Childcare can and very often does fail, regardless of who the caregiver is. Here I look at how easily care fails and at consequences of bad care. The otherwise rich literature on a feminist ethics of care has so far provided little exploration of the issue of bad care. Some theorizing of bad care is negative, one can reduce it from what different authors have to say about good care. Some people do not know how to manage to keep their children safe, to help their personal development and ensure proper socialization, they are not giving sufficiently good care. In order to achieve all the goals of such care, one needs a favourable constellation of external circumstances and individual abilities. External circumstances include parents’ material resources, their social status, the institutional set-up of the caregiver’s society, as well as cultural norms and expectations, which can put pressure on caregivers to prevent children’s development, if such development is socially unacceptable, but even in ideal conditions, conflicts may develop between the different aims of care35.Since in all societies many(perhaps most) parents struggle with precarious conditions, parenting is often likely to fall short of the standards of sufficiently good care. Turning to the individual abilities needed to ensure good care, I believe that a good caregiver has to be attentive to the cared for, responsible for her or his wellbeing, competent in addressing needs and responsive to the other person’s needs. It follows that inattentiveness, inability to take responsibility for the child’s wellbeing or inability to properly address the child’s needs, as well as not being responsive enough to a child, will all count as failings of care. When extreme, such failings take the form of serious negligence and abuse and constitute grounds for removing children from their parents’ custody and, when possible, placing them in other people’s continuous care. Majority of failings are not extreme, but they are very common, indeed every day, failings to which we are all susceptible, rather than easily avoidable mistakes. There is no reason to believe that most other caregivers could avoid them.
For instance, most societies have gender expectations which make it unacceptable for boys to be as emotional as girls and for girls to be as assertive as boys. Parents who believe, as many parents do, that is it important for their children to become socially acceptable cannot help but require, or at least encourage, children to conform to gender, class, race etc. expectations, even when this has costs in terms of children’s development. One example is the conflict between encouraging the child’s development, for example encouraging her to explore the world and her own limits by climbing trees and the aim of physical preservation of the child. There is no reason to believe that one can always strike a perfect balance between too much and too little protection.
Whwe When too many accidents happen to children, it looks as if the child is being neglected, and it grounds for removing the child/children from the parents custody, and it sometimes causes or makes the child/children to become distressed. Some of these children may grow into adults lacking in self-confidence, curiosity, social skills, purposefulness and many other traits that influence how well one’s life goes and one’s ability to make use of opportunities.
Proper and adequate Care shapes us morally, and when it is not adequate it lays the ground for moral of shortcomings. Particular forms of good, as well as bad, care tend to reproduce themselves throughout generations. Turning from the ethics of care to the field of developmental psychology, the requirements of sufficiently good care appear even more difficult to meet. According to British child psychologist Donald Winnicott, the first psychologist to have looked closely at the standards of sufficiently good care, in fact, he was interested only in sufficiently good mothering, the mother figure should be able to meet the child’s needs and at the same time allow the necessary amount of frustration, which enables the child to develop a sense of being separate from the mother. The mother has to be present and protective, yet without inhibiting the child’s development. She has to sometimes fail in promptly meeting the dependency needs of the child, such as the needs for food or comfort, in order to make possible the child’s separation from her, which is a necessary step in achieving maturity. It seems all too easy to fall short of this ideal: too much attention given to the child can be just as bad as too little, the same can be said about control, or thinking about the child’s needs. In spite of her ambivalent feelings towards her child, a mother is forever behaving benevolently, and is able to ignore her own needs in order to ensure the child’s needs are being optimally met which, as seen, can involve occasional frustration of the child’s needs. This is indeed a highly idealized and unrealistic representation of the ‘good enough mother’, as has been argued by feminist psychologists. IN response to Winnicott’s and his followers’ ideal of a mother, new theories of good mothering/parenting are being developed, which look at the realistic implications of the emotional ambivalence inherent in parenthood. Love for one’s children motivates parents to make the very taxing commitment to raise their children well, and ensures both continuity of care and parents’ striving to uphold high standards of care. But parents responsible for hands-on care can also at times hate their children even while loving them. Parker argues that ambivalence in parenting (experienced by both children and parents) is unavoidable: even the best parent will be unable to avoid frustrating her or his child, and even the easiest children will put frustrating and boundless demands on their parents. As such, ambivalence need not ruin caring relationships or render bad care unavoidable, especially if it is individually and socially accepted as part of what it means to parent; it does, however, increase the likelihood of failures of care. Moreover, ambivalence makes parenting particularly difficult, intense and emotionally costly. I shall return to this point later since it constitutes a ground to avoid social isolation in childrearing. Non-parental care is beneficial as a particularly reliable way to avoid social isolation.
IV. Non-parental care as response to the risks of care The experience of strong, ambivalent feelings in the context of parenting is a main theme in object-relations theory. In this section I advance five reasons why some childcare should be provided by non-parents, most of which are based on the various ways in which parental care can or does fail. Non-parental care mitigates the effects and spreads the risk of bad care, teaches children how to enter caring relationships with initial strangers, addresses children’s structural vulnerability to their care-givers, helps children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship and, finally, redistributes the responsibility for care and the ensuing blame for bad care more widely. All arguments look at the wellbeing of children and/or parents. Arguments four and six are also arguments based on justice – grounded in children’s needs and fairness to children and, respectively, in a duty to prevent unacceptable forms of vulnerability. They hold irrespective of whether the costs of childcare should be supported only by parents or by the entire society. By contrast, arguments seven and eight are an issue of fairness only if one thinks that the costs of childcare (in this case, non-material) should be shared by the entire society. All arguments relying on the widespread nature of failed care presuppose that, while it is possible and desirable to educate people to be better parents, the social organization of childcare should be based on the premise that parents cannot be expected to avoid failures of care. I assume that being a sufficiently good parent, like being able to create and sustain good relationships with people in general, is not only a matter of acquiring the right knowledge about the other person’s needs, but also a matter of having and displaying the right emotions and character traits. Care may fail as a result of mistakes in how one thinks children should be raised, which are easy to correct through parental training. But care also fails as a result of most caregivers’ flaws of character and psychological maladjustments, which are much more difficult, if indeed possible, to correct. There is no reason to believe that parents have either better or worse characters or that they are either better or less well adjusted than people who are not parents. If so, then the same limitations which apply to improving people in general also apply to improving people’s parenting. I believe that new parents should be placed in parenting classes to teach them how to properly care for and raise children, just in case if they were not raised right, or do not know have to care for themselves or children adequately/properly.
Reference/ Work Cited www.psychologytoday.com www.familieschildrenchildcare.org
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
Janet C. Gornik and Marcia K.Meyers,
Families that Work. Policies of Reconciling Parenthood and Employment
Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal
(Springer Academic Publishing, 2009)
Moral Boundaries: a Political Argument for an Ethic of Cares
Shakeda McRoberts
Online Juvenile Delinquency
Due: 9/1/2013
Arguments for non-parental care for children
Abstract: I reviewed three existing arguments in favour of having some childcare done by none. My arguments are the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. It is imperative of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children’s structural vulnerability to their care-givers, of helping children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship, and of distributing the responsibility of care and the ensuing blame …show more content…
for bad care more widely. I conclude that non-parental childcare should be universal. The value of non-parental childcare is a widely debated issue. Although in many contemporary societies most children are exposed to some non-parental care carried out either in various institutions or by nannies, friends and extended families, people disagree about its benefits – especially for preschool children – and few believe there is a duty to ensure that all children are exposed to it. The law usually allows parents to exclude children of preschool age from non-parental care and, where homeschooling is allowed, non-parental care can be avoided for much longer. Here, I criticize the still widespread conviction that there is nothing wrong in confining childcare to parents. Moreover, I argue that there is a duty to ensure that care for all children older than one is shared between parents.
2 People who come into children’s lives as strangers but who are prepared and willing to develop caring relationships with them. By ‘parents’ I mean the primary figures in children’s lives, who take the moral and legal responsibility for caring continuously for children until they reach maturity. By ‘non- parental care’ I refer to care given by people who are not the parents of the children for whom they care but who may be other children’s parents. I outline three arguments already present in the literature on childcare and then introduce five more arguments that discuss the value of exposing all children older than one to some non-parental care. Some of the arguments are based on the wellbeing of children and/or parents, others on fairness (towards children and/or parents, and towards mothers) and some on both wellbeing and fairness. The sixth argument concludes that non-parental childcare is a matter of duty towards children resulting from their dependence on caregivers. While some of the arguments show that non-parental care is highly desirable, others have the more radical implication that excluding children from non-parental care is morally wrong, with the ultimate conclusion being that parents do not have the right to exclude their children from non-parental care. Although there are different grounds for the different arguments I discuss – wellbeing, fairness and duty – I hope that, taken together, they support each other in making the case for a system of universal, compulsory and state-regulated childcare similar to the2
The parents may be biological or not, single or partnered, married (to each other) or not, gay or heterosexual; I do not discuss how different types of family may impact on childrearing. The only assumption I make is that children need to have at least one adult committed to providing continuous care and thus serving as a primary figure, and that societies should ensure that this need is met.3 Arguments four, seven and eight rely on feminist work on the various ways in which child carers can fail to give adequate care. Robert Goodin, on whose theory of vulnerability I ground the sixth argument, has written himself about family relationships and childrearing.
Protecting the Vulnerable
This argument rests on the importance of fairness towards children, on the endemic nature of mistakes in care and on children’s vulnerability to failed care, I shall not consider the more radical possibilities of addressing these issues by either abolishing the family and raising children in well-run orphanages or by instituting a parenting license scheme. Instead, I start from the assumption that parenting as we know it5is valuable and worth preserving, as long as parents do not do all the childcare. The effects of non-parental care, and especially of institutional care6, on children have an important bearing on their overall desirability. It is difficult to assess the evidence, not only because some the available data are contradictory (and often research on childcare is ideologically driven), but also because much of the existing institutional childcare is deficient and thus adequate empirical evidence is very difficult to gather. These difficulties aside, after a thorough assessment of the literature on childcare in the U.S., Jane Waldfogel has recently concluded that, while non-parental childcare during their first year might be harmful to children, non-parental care of children after their first year appears to be neutral or even beneficial. Obviously, non-parental care must meet certain minimal criteria. Based on recent research on the effects of institutional childcare, Daniel Engster
I think children’s need for a continuous and highly personalized bond of care, and the importance adults place on parenting rule out the universal orphanage option.
I believe the intrusion into people’s privacy involved in a licensing scheme would be exceedingly damaging to individual freedom and to interpersonal relationships.
Social Theory and Practice
That is, a practice that involves one or several adults being the main care-givers of their children, whom they have come to parent sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident. Many societies have histories of particularly bad institutional care. In these cases, people have the understandable perception that care given in institutional settings is necessarily inferior to family care and often unacceptably bad.
What Children Need
Non-parental childcare arrangements are not harmful for most children as long as they meet various quality measures including:
a. low adult-child ratios, adequate levels of caregiver training, staff stability and decent physical facilities. The precise content of desirable non-parental care will vary with children’s individual needs, which are partially determined by age. In practice, exposing all children older than one to some non-parental care could mean, for example, that they spend a few hours every day in childcare institutions. Non-parental care can take the form of day care for infants, kindergartens for preschool children and school and after-school activities for older children.
I. Non-parental care and justice
The discussion of universal non-parental care involves three distinct, yet very closely related questions. Only the first of these are about the value of non-parental care is fully addressed in this article. The other two questions are, Should non-parental care necessarily be provided by professionally trained people and, if so, should it be provided in state-regulated institutions or in private settings? and, who should bear its costs: parents, society, or a combination of both? While I cannot engage at length with the last two questions, some of the arguments I discuss suggest that non- parental care should be provided by professional caregivers in state-regulated institutions. In the context of establishing whether justice requires universal non-parental care, the more difficult question is whether the costs of childcare should be at least partly borne by society.
There are several reasons why the costs of childrearing should be (at least) to some extent socialized. Engster (2007)takes the fact that we, as children, have all appealed to other people’s care to be a ground for a universal duty of care towards whoever needs it, including (other people’s) children. In her book
Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family
(Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 2008) Nancy Folbre argues that parents and non- parents should share the costs of childrearing because children are akin to ‘public goods’ – having children is necessary for social survival. I engage later in this article with Ann Alstott’s argument that, since raising children is
5are highly disputed10 and it is beyond the scope of this paper to make the case in favour of this position. For those not convinced that justice requires us to share the costs of childcare, arguments three, seven and eight will be arguments about parental wellbeing rather than arguments concerning fairness towards parents. Most arguments will however be unaffected by the answer to the question whether childless people should bear the costs of non-parental care. State-regulated childcare institutions, or other forms of organized non-parental care, could be funded by parents only, for example through a tax non-payable by childless people. In this paper, I remain agnostic on this issue, but I point out its relevance for particular arguments. I assume there are several, sometimes divergent, considerations that determine what is, overall, just; these include fairness, needs, rights, duties and utility11. The relevant considerations for judging that universal non-parental care is just which I discuss here are children’s and parents’ needs, fairness and a general duty to protect children for unacceptable forms of dependency. I believe that, taken together, these arguments show that parents do not have the moral right to exclude their children from non-parental care. All the reasons I discuss in section four indicate that non-parental care advances the well-being of both children and parents by meeting some of their needs. This claim would not, on its own, make the case that non-parental care is required by justice, given the widely accepted belief that parents are free to decide what is best for themselves and, with qualifications, for their children. This is particularly true when non-parental care is one of several possibilities available to meet particular needs, as in some of the cases I discuss. A second consideration, prominent in the present article, is fairness: different arguments show that non-parental care would advance fairness towards children, and such resource-intensive activity in terms of time, economic resources and emotional involvement, it is unfair that parents should shoulder these costs alone.
The fairness towards parents/mothers claim depends, however, on how one answers the above question about sharing the costs of childcare. Fairness towards parents alone would not mean that non-parental care should be universal and mandatory since parents may waive their claim to fair treatment – but rather that it should be easily available to all children, possibly at general expense. Therefore, the most important of the fairness-based arguments is that fairness requires us to spread the risk, and limit the damage, that failed care entails for children. If true, this is a strong reason to ensure that all children receive some non-parental care. In spite of the importance we place on fairness, however, sometimes we think that what is fair does not always coincide with what is just. In the case of childcare, some individual prerogatives, such as parental rights, might limit the pursuit of fairness. To meet this objection, I advance an additional argument: I argue that children’s depends on their caregivers and the inherently asymmetrical and unequal relationships between children and caregivers generate a duty to diversify caregivers. Even if all parents were able to provide sufficient care, we would still have a duty to expose all children to some non-parental care as a way of avoiding monopolies of care and limiting children’s vulnerability to any of their care-givers. I conclude that parental rights should be limited by a general duty to ensure that children do not depend too much on their parents’ hands-on care. Being required by justice, universal non-parental care is, as such, mandatory. Implementation should, however, proceed very carefully.
Societies vary widely in their ability to provide adequate non- parental care for all children, and in the levels of parental opposition to non-parental care.
It is possible that, in some cases, making non-parental care mandatory may do more damage than good, since care provided in inadequate conditions can harm children. When the organization of universal, adequate non-parental care is unfeasible due to lack of resources, finding the necessary resources, including children with special needs, for whom adequate non-parental care might involve much higher expense, should become a political priority. When parental opposition to mandatory non-parental care risk introducing harmful disruptions into children’s lives, we should not simply accept this opposition but try to persuade parents. For this reason, it is important that arguments which show that non-parental care is a matter of fairness and duty be accompanied by arguments which show that it advances children’s and parents’ wellbeing. In my paper some of these arguments are based on children’s and parents’ needs. A fundamental normative assumption I make is that fair societies ensure that everybody’s essential needs are met. Moreover, when the satisfaction of needs impacts on people’s (often comparative) opportunities to lead good lives, need and fairness point in the same direction, providing all the more reason to ensure that needs are properly addressed. Children are dependent on adults’ care if their needs for security, nourishment, hygiene, affection, socialization and basic education are to be met. …show more content…
Since it shapes their bodies, personalities and various abilities, the care they receive is crucial in determining their opportunities, both as children and as future adults. Parents, in turn, have their own needs, which mean they should also be cared for, but, as adults, they are less dependent than children are. A salient need of parents, which is seriously frustrated when childcare cannot be shared, is for time. Parents need some time free from the responsibility of caring for children if they are to have proper rest and the opportunity to pursue any other projects of their own. Equally important, parents as well as children need the responsibility for childcare to be divided among several persons in order to better manage the ambivalent14feelings that permeate ordinary parent-child relationships. The issue of caring for children very imperative/important. Raising children the right way will make the world a better place. I work with the assumption that both children and parents experience ambivalent feelings towards each other, which is a widely accepted thesis, based on clinical experience, in object-relation theory. By ambivalence I mean that the love that binds most parents and children is inevitably accompanied by anger, frustration and, occasionally, even hatred.
still carried out by women. I agree with the vast feminist literature that explains why this is unfair to women and possibly bad for all involved. The claim defended here, that some childcare should be done by non-parents, is backed by reasons of gender fairness. Feminists have long argued that care work should be shared between women and men. One obvious way to achieve this is through a redistribution of care work between mothers and fathers, a proposal to which I am fully sympathetic. However, where attempts to encourage fathers (through regulated paternal leave, for instance) to participate in more hands-on care for their children are relatively unsuccessful, institutional care is an alternative context in which men can be encouraged to carry out some of the childcare. It is likely that childcare will attract more men who are inclined to care for children (but who do not have the proper incentives to do so under the current social organization of care) if social norms require that some of it would be provided in adequate institutions, it would be given a higher status than it currently has, and its quality would be acknowledged as a matter of common responsibility, because the social organization of care is deeply gendered, the conflicts between the needs of children and those of caregivers often take the form of conflicts between children’s and mothers’ needs. Since the wellbeing of mothers and children are so deeply intertwined, it is tempting to ignore these conflicts, conflate children’s and mothers’ needs, and perhaps retreat into an idealized – and ideological – representation of selfless motherhood. The idealization of motherhood, often encountered in popular culture and even in mainstream psychotherapy, obliterates those needs and interests of As such this would of course not resolve the issues of gender justice within individual heterosexual couples. But if it is true that some sources of widespread sexist attitudes reside in children’s lack of experience of caring men, then institutional care provided by men who are presumably qualified, and willing to care will go some way towards a more gender-fair society. See, for instance, Jessica Benjamin Research on childcare work and gender suggests that low pay is the main disincentive for men to seek and retain employment as childcare workers, especially given an enduring expectation that men be the primary breadwinners.
The Capacity to Care.
Mothers which do not serve children’s own interests. I hope to avoid this idealization without falling for the complementary one, namely the presupposition that whatever advances mothers’ needs should necessarily serve children’s interests. Instead, I assume that a fair society will seek institutional arrangements that minimize rather than exacerbate the conflict between mothers’/parents’ and children’s needs, even if this is expensive. Suppose, for example, that a society without adequate institutional care were to sharpen the conflicts between mothers’/parents’ need to pursue their professional life and children’s needs for care. Also suppose that organizing institutional childcare of an adequate standard was a more expensive option than leaving it entirely up to individual families. I assume that, other things being equal, fairness is a reason to choose the institutional arrangement that is more expensive but which makes it more likely that neither mothers’/parents’ nor children’s needs will be extensively sacrificed. This last claim might be unconvincing for those who believe that it is fair that parents support the full cost of childrearing; but the overall argument of this paper is supported, rather than dependent, on this claim.
II. Existing arguments for non-parental care
The recent literature on social equality, family and gender offers several, not always fully explicit, reasons for part of the childcare being provided by non-parents. To my knowledge these reasons have not yet been presented together in a systematic argument. Common to all these approaches is a relatively unproblematic perspective on quality of care issues. They assume parental care is essential if children are to develop into autonomous, properly socialized adults who can form and pursue life plans of their own care is thus a primary good.
I can see two different reasons for this. A general reason is that in a just society everyone’s basic needs will be taken into consideration, and needs for work and pursuing individual projects, as well as needs for care, are indeed basic. A second, special reason is that mothers’/parents’ needs are not as independent from those of their children as are the needs of unrelated adults. There also seems to be a special kind of moral harm in social arrangements that the needs of mothers/parents and children if alternative arrangements are available, when this happens, frustrating the needs of each party involves frustrating the needs of the other party as well.
The fact that children grow up in families poses a serious challenge to fairness, families are sites of very unequal distributions of important goods, such as education and socialization. Not only do children share their parents’ material condition, but they also spontaneously inherit much of their parents’ way of speaking the language, interests in various pursuits, habits and social relationships. Class, power, social status and education are being passed on from one generation to the next within families. Even in the absence of crass social inequalities, parents’ freedom to raise their children according to their own values, which is recognized and protected by liberal regimes, means that parents’ impact on their children’s wellbeing and future opportunities is very significant. While there are good reasons for protecting this freedom, there is a strong case for providing some non-parental childcare in order to level the playing field and mitigate, if not eliminate, some of the above-mentioned inequalities. Barbara Bergmann, for instance, argued that if some care takes place outside the family, in daycare centers, kindergartens, and schools, children are given the chance to catch up on whatever they might miss at home in terms of education, social relations, and exposure to various values and lifestyles. The more egalitarian these institutions will be, the better they will counterbalance home-inherited inequalities. There are some non-parental care draws on the fact that care can easily fail. There are of course many other reasons why non-parental care is beneficial.
ManMaMany people assume that publicly funded, state-regulated institutions are more likely to be egalitarian than market-run caring arrangements.
This does not necessarily mean that the costs of childrearing must be shared between parents and childless people since the necessary public funds may come from taxes paid only by parents. On this account, universal non-parental care would rectify, or prevent the accumulation of, pre-existing unfair inequalities. It is very urgent to be aware of the risk that particular arrangements of non-parental care might perpetuate, or exacerbate, various social divisions, including class and economic ones, in a similar way to that in which public schools have been criticized for doing so. This is more likely if parents are allowed to choose the institution their child will attend, or if children attend local care institutions in class-segregated neighborhoods. If such obstacles are not insuperable, the conclusion of this argument is that fairness towards children demands the provision of universal on-parental care. Making the non-exit commitment lighter a second somewhat symmetrical argument based on distributive justice takes parents’ wellbeing and opportunities as grounds for the provision of some care outside the home. Parents commitment for the care of their children involves serious costs in terms of time, economic opportunities and personal
autonomy.
School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent
(Routledge, 2003) and Brighouse and Swift (2006; 2009) argue, much of the parental care that results in social and economic opportunities for children consists of inconspicuous, everyday actions, such as reading bedtime stories to one’s child. Even in an egalitarian society people will presumably have different ways of parenting, leading to unequal opportunities for their children. Because choosing particular lifestyles that parents share with their childrenhas intrinsic, and significant, value (Brighouse and Swift, 2006) we would not want to eliminate all such differences. We would have reason to organize some institutional care to offset the inequality-inducing effects of the family, even in an egalitarian society.
I agree with Brighouse and Swift of the make a ‘no exit’ commitment, which means making a commitment from which one cannot and should not depart lightly)to give significant weight to their children’s interests, often putting them before their own interests, and indeed to shape their own lives such that their children’s lives go well. Children’s need for continuity in care means this commitment extends over many years, hence it represents a very significant opportunity cost to parents. This cost can be high enough to endanger parents’ autonomy. Furthermore, having children is no longer in modern societies a source of economic benefit or an insurance that one will be cared for when ill or old. Thus parents’ commitment to their children is nowadays more demanding than it has ever been, since it involves high costs and no material benefits. According to Alstott, while it is fair that parents shoulder much of the cost of rearing their children, since they have freely decided to parent , it is also fair that parents be given social support to offset some of the cost of their commitment and to protect their autonomy. Alstott suggests the introduction of a caretaker resource account for parents in the form of money to be used for childcare, parents’ own education or retirement. Although Alstott herself does not propose this, ensuring that all parents have access to child care would reduce the burden of the ‘no exit’ commitment, by redistributing to parents one of the resources they are often most short of: time26. In this case childcare would have to be funded through universal taxation, since its aim is to redistribute some of the costs of childcare from parents to the wider society. Thus, depending on the answer to the question of who should support the costs of childcare, this is either an argument based on fairness towards parents or, at least, an argument concluding that universal childcare would be conducive to parents’ wellbeing by meeting their need for time. According to the non-exit argument, non-parental care is merely one of the several alternative ways in which parental commitment could and should be made lighter, but people who decide to parent will continue to support much of the cost of parenting themselves.
I will argue that non-parental care is the only way of reducing the burden of guilt which often comes with parenting. Advancing gender justice third reason for having some non-parental care is grounded in gender fairness. In all societies mothers bear the costs of childrearing disproportionately, forsaking career opportunities, education and personal development to a much larger extent than men.
Women often miss out on opportunities because they are constantly occupied with most of the hands-on care for their children due to a combination of lack of choice and an ideology of the ever-present mother. If all childcare is to be provided by parents, then at least one of the parents must forsake the opportunity to work full-time. Given the current structure of the labour market, working part-time comes with significant penalties in terms of income, benefits, intrinsic quality of work and, very significantly, in terms of future prospects for good jobs and financial security in case of divorce. In practice, it is largely mothers’ who work part-time in order to raise children. If provisions were made for parents regularly to leave their children in the adequate care of other people, they would have better opportunities to organize their work and family life in gender-egalitarian ways. Moreover, shifting some care work away from mothers, especially if this takes the form of professional care that involves men as well as women, will give care more social recognition. Since working part-time often makes it less likely that one will be assigned interesting, challenging, and intrinsically rewarding tasks, or that one will have the same degree of autonomy and control over one’s work as full-time workers.
Caring for the children and house hold duties has been traditionally considered a female occupation since the beginning of time, this will in turn improve women’s social standing, assuming that the majority of care work will continue to be done by women. If the non- parental care is provided in well-resourced institutions, the recognition gains for the caring occupations will arguably be even more significant. This argument appeals to gender fairness: it shows that non-parental care is required because itrectifies (a) the disproportionate way in which mothers miss opportunities, and (b) the low social recognition attached to care-giving as women’s work. Both the first and the third arguments presuppose pre-existing forms of unfairness and, as such, are vulnerable to the objection that it would be better to eliminate unfairness directly rather than mitigate its consequences through non-parental childcare. In the rest of this paper I show that thereremain reasons of fairness (as well as other reasons) for having universal non-parental care even in an economically and gender fair society.
III. Inevitable failings of care
Childcare can and very often does fail, regardless of who the caregiver is. Here I look at how easily care fails and at consequences of bad care. The otherwise rich literature on a feminist ethics of care has so far provided little exploration of the issue of bad care. Some theorizing of bad care is negative, one can reduce it from what different authors have to say about good care. Some people do not know how to manage to keep their children safe, to help their personal development and ensure proper socialization, they are not giving sufficiently good care. In order to achieve all the goals of such care, one needs a favourable constellation of external circumstances and individual abilities. External circumstances include parents’ material resources, their social status, the institutional set-up of the caregiver’s society, as well as cultural norms and expectations, which can put pressure on caregivers to prevent children’s development, if such development is socially unacceptable, but even in ideal conditions, conflicts may develop between the different aims of care35.Since in all societies many(perhaps most) parents struggle with precarious conditions, parenting is often likely to fall short of the standards of sufficiently good care. Turning to the individual abilities needed to ensure good care, I believe that a good caregiver has to be attentive to the cared for, responsible for her or his wellbeing, competent in addressing needs and responsive to the other person’s needs. It follows that inattentiveness, inability to take responsibility for the child’s wellbeing or inability to properly address the child’s needs, as well as not being responsive enough to a child, will all count as failings of care. When extreme, such failings take the form of serious negligence and abuse and constitute grounds for removing children from their parents’ custody and, when possible, placing them in other people’s continuous care. Majority of failings are not extreme, but they are very common, indeed every day, failings to which we are all susceptible, rather than easily avoidable mistakes. There is no reason to believe that most other caregivers could avoid them.
For instance, most societies have gender expectations which make it unacceptable for boys to be as emotional as girls and for girls to be as assertive as boys. Parents who believe, as many parents do, that is it important for their children to become socially acceptable cannot help but require, or at least encourage, children to conform to gender, class, race etc. expectations, even when this has costs in terms of children’s development. One example is the conflict between encouraging the child’s development, for example encouraging her to explore the world and her own limits by climbing trees and the aim of physical preservation of the child. There is no reason to believe that one can always strike a perfect balance between too much and too little protection.
Whwe When too many accidents happen to children, it looks as if the child is being neglected, and it grounds for removing the child/children from the parents custody, and it sometimes causes or makes the child/children to become distressed. Some of these children may grow into adults lacking in self-confidence, curiosity, social skills, purposefulness and many other traits that influence how well one’s life goes and one’s ability to make use of opportunities.
Proper and adequate Care shapes us morally, and when it is not adequate it lays the ground for moral of shortcomings. Particular forms of good, as well as bad, care tend to reproduce themselves throughout generations. Turning from the ethics of care to the field of developmental psychology, the requirements of sufficiently good care appear even more difficult to meet. According to British child psychologist Donald Winnicott, the first psychologist to have looked closely at the standards of sufficiently good care, in fact, he was interested only in sufficiently good mothering, the mother figure should be able to meet the child’s needs and at the same time allow the necessary amount of frustration, which enables the child to develop a sense of being separate from the mother. The mother has to be present and protective, yet without inhibiting the child’s development. She has to sometimes fail in promptly meeting the dependency needs of the child, such as the needs for food or comfort, in order to make possible the child’s separation from her, which is a necessary step in achieving maturity. It seems all too easy to fall short of this ideal: too much attention given to the child can be just as bad as too little, the same can be said about control, or thinking about the child’s needs. In spite of her ambivalent feelings towards her child, a mother is forever behaving benevolently, and is able to ignore her own needs in order to ensure the child’s needs are being optimally met which, as seen, can involve occasional frustration of the child’s needs. This is indeed a highly idealized and unrealistic representation of the ‘good enough mother’, as has been argued by feminist psychologists. IN response to Winnicott’s and his followers’ ideal of a mother, new theories of good mothering/parenting are being developed, which look at the realistic implications of the emotional ambivalence inherent in parenthood. Love for one’s children motivates parents to make the very taxing commitment to raise their children well, and ensures both continuity of care and parents’ striving to uphold high standards of care. But parents responsible for hands-on care can also at times hate their children even while loving them. Parker argues that ambivalence in parenting (experienced by both children and parents) is unavoidable: even the best parent will be unable to avoid frustrating her or his child, and even the easiest children will put frustrating and boundless demands on their parents. As such, ambivalence need not ruin caring relationships or render bad care unavoidable, especially if it is individually and socially accepted as part of what it means to parent; it does, however, increase the likelihood of failures of care. Moreover, ambivalence makes parenting particularly difficult, intense and emotionally costly. I shall return to this point later since it constitutes a ground to avoid social isolation in childrearing. Non-parental care is beneficial as a particularly reliable way to avoid social isolation.
IV. Non-parental care as response to the risks of care The experience of strong, ambivalent feelings in the context of parenting is a main theme in object-relations theory. In this section I advance five reasons why some childcare should be provided by non-parents, most of which are based on the various ways in which parental care can or does fail. Non-parental care mitigates the effects and spreads the risk of bad care, teaches children how to enter caring relationships with initial strangers, addresses children’s structural vulnerability to their care-givers, helps children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship and, finally, redistributes the responsibility for care and the ensuing blame for bad care more widely. All arguments look at the wellbeing of children and/or parents. Arguments four and six are also arguments based on justice – grounded in children’s needs and fairness to children and, respectively, in a duty to prevent unacceptable forms of vulnerability. They hold irrespective of whether the costs of childcare should be supported only by parents or by the entire society. By contrast, arguments seven and eight are an issue of fairness only if one thinks that the costs of childcare (in this case, non-material) should be shared by the entire society. All arguments relying on the widespread nature of failed care presuppose that, while it is possible and desirable to educate people to be better parents, the social organization of childcare should be based on the premise that parents cannot be expected to avoid failures of care. I assume that being a sufficiently good parent, like being able to create and sustain good relationships with people in general, is not only a matter of acquiring the right knowledge about the other person’s needs, but also a matter of having and displaying the right emotions and character traits. Care may fail as a result of mistakes in how one thinks children should be raised, which are easy to correct through parental training. But care also fails as a result of most caregivers’ flaws of character and psychological maladjustments, which are much more difficult, if indeed possible, to correct. There is no reason to believe that parents have either better or worse characters or that they are either better or less well adjusted than people who are not parents. If so, then the same limitations which apply to improving people in general also apply to improving people’s parenting. I believe that new parents should be placed in parenting classes to teach them how to properly care for and raise children, just in case if they were not raised right, or do not know have to care for themselves or children adequately/properly.
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