Boobs, Boobs and more Boobs….
Do women make it difficult for men to show love for children in
childcare without meaning to?
An essay looking at language used around childcare.
Jane Malcolm
During a discussion with my PhD
supervisor he pointed out that there appeared to be a lot of “boobs” being
mentioned in the data I had collected. We laughed at this because he was
referring to a comment from one participant, who whilst talking about intimacy,
in an interview said;
“Yeah, a girl I just walked past and one of
her pals are in the tweenie room and she is in the baby room and she was joking
around with them. And the staff member was joking around with the child in the
tweenie room and he said to her “you’ve got boobs” and gives her a squash on
the chest and she has a laugh back and it is just a bit of kind of fun, they
are having a joke and have a good relationship. Yeah so particularly the baby
sort of style because there is so much contact you are carrying them and
cuddling them a lot of them are still kind of finishing breastfeeding when they
come into the nursery, so you know you are kind of feeding a bottle, but they
are cooried into a boob and that sort of feeling as well. That is intimate.”
Delightful as this comment first
appears it got me thinking that maybe in this simple, innocent statement this
participant is saying that “Boobs” are an important asset for childcare, or go
even further are they a necessity? This participant would probably defend
herself as the nursery she manages does encourage the recruitment of male
practitioners and went onto to explain that she sees no difference in the roles
that male and female practitioners should take on. But in that one innocent
comment, it made me wonder how deep seated the values and beliefs are around
who cares for children?
What was interesting when I carried
out my interviews was that without having to ask many of the female
participants made comments about how parents were uncomfortable with male
practitioners giving intimate care to their children, the male participants
however that I interviewed, whilst they showed an understanding of why parents
might have reservations, were not unduly concerned about the act of showing
love to the children in their care. You don’t have to look too far back in
history to see that the role of childcare was that of the females in society.
John Bowlby (1953) says of fathers “they
have their uses even in infancy…Not only do they provide for their wives to
enable them to devote themselves unrestrictedly to the care of the infant and
toddler, but, by providing love and companionship, they support the mother
emotionally and help her maintain that harmonious contented mood in the
atmosphere of which her infant thrives.” Thankfully the role of fathers has changed
somewhat dramatically from the 50’s with both parents having equal
responsibilities for childcare. But have things changed? One participant made
the comment that it was a father who had a problem with a male practitioner:
“And we have got a male member of staff, well
one of the Dads who is very, very, anti-males in nursery, even before he (the
staff member) started there was an impression of “why is there going to be a
man in the nursery?”
Another participant reported that
they had parents who said to her “you
would never employ a man, would you?”. This
participant went on to explain why she thought it was difficult for men to come
into childcare:
“I think there is a sea-change thinking in
that, I think we have come through, whenever the pendulum in society swings, it
always swings too far and I think we terrified men, we frightened them in being
intimate with their children and that is so sad, em because that has a knock on
effect of when they grow up and become parents themselves. Men in childcare is
a huge thing but it is all tied up in this, tied up in lots of things”
What I found interesting about
her comment was that somehow “we”
terrified men, somehow society has made men be somehow frightened to be
intimate with the children in their care, their own families even. But this is
a woman’s point of view. Are we, the women in childcare, still looking in on
men and saying “oh yes they are just the same as us” and somehow inadvertently
making the point that there might have been a difference in the first place?
The male practitioners that I interviewed had varying points of view. One said
he had concerns “As a male, opinion and
fear of being seen wrong way. Being accused of something just by talking about
love in early years.” Whereas another talked quite passionately about love
being important;
“I do think it is a very important part of
the whole process because we are humans who work here and it is humans who we
work for and you have got to have love, I’ll use that word, love, for them, I,
I mean not like the love for your own children, but we love and care them and
you want to show that.”
Where do we go from here? Have we
terrified men into being intimate or loving towards children? Has love become
synonymous with sex and child abuse? Returning
to the point in my original opening paragraph, I turned to literature around embodiment
to explore the seemingly entrenched idea that women are the best at caring for
children because they have the physiology to do so.
One of my participants said “holding babies and feeding them in your
arms and they are cuddling into your boobs, which is all kind of being part of
intimate” another made the comment “let
them (the child) sit on your hip when you are telling their Mum was a good boy
he has been today”. The language in these comments could be seen as
maternal. When we think of mothers we have an image of a baby sitting on their
hip, breastfeeding, cuddling into “boobs”. This image is not surprising
given biologically women are pre-determined to be the caregivers to the
children that they give birth to. However, Voestermans and Verheggen (2013)
warn that holding “the biological make-up
accountable” is not really an acceptable solution for changing this
perception of childcare. Maybe it is useful to consider how we got to the point
where this image is so deep in the fabric of society that even female
practitioners who champion the role of the male in childcare still refer to a
very female discourse of care in their language. Perhaps it is useful to look
at the discourse within society in terms of parental care. Whilst both men and
female buy into the idea of equality, there may still a mismatch around what
happens to childcare in the home (Coltrane, 2000).
Studies show that there is still
a predominance of the mother as the main parent, with fathers more often than
not taking on a childcare role on a more part time basis (Doucet, 2001,
Sunderland, 2000). Given this phenomenon it would seem natural to expect
gendered roles in childcare to be influenced by a discourse and narrative that
is already in western society (Petrassi, 2012). If the language around
childcare suggests that only women can look after children properly then are
female practitioners inadvertently part of the reason men are both unable to
accept that a male could look after their child as well or indeed why men don’t
come into the sector? I understand that this may be a controversial view but it
did seem to come across in this way in the discussions I was having with the
participants, particularly the female participants. In a study looking at
gender roles in parenting, Petrassi (2012) interviewed both mothers and fathers
and determined that women, she called them “selfless mothers”, not only spoke
about how hard it was for them but also that they took on a lot of work because
they felt only they were able to do it properly or at the time it needed done.
The fact that the study coined the phrase “shirking father” suggests an
inequality in childcare. This study also looked at the language around how
mothers spoke about their status in the household. They spoke about having the
freedom to decide what the family would do, with one saying, “we’ve never had
any battles about it, we just do what I want”. This again suggests that women
feel they are positioned in a place where they are in charge. For me this goes
against everything that feminism has fought against, for gender equality.
How do we redress this imbalance? I
think in the childcare setting language needs to be challenged. Questions need to be asked
of the female practitioners, do they really think men can work with the
children as effectively as they can? I worry that at the moment there is a
culture of saying “oh a male practitioner can do everything that a female
practitioner can do” when in fact the language that female practitioners use
says something contradictory which perpetuates the idea that women are the ones
who should care for children. This problem feels deep-seated in culture and
society and whilst the culture in ELC settings is changing, albeit incredibly
slowly, perhaps starting with the female workforce and working on language and
discourse is the place to start.
Reference List
Bowlby, John (1953). Childcare and the Growth of Love. Pelican Original: Aylesbury.
Coltrane, S (2000). Research on household labour: Modelling and Measuring the Social Embeddedness of Routine Family Work. Journal of Marriage and the Family. 62:4 pgs 1208 - 1233.
Doucet, A (2001). 'You see the need perhaps more clearly than I have'. Exploring gendered processes of domestic responsibility. Journal of Family Issues. 22:3 pg 328 - 335.
Sunderland, J (2000). Baby Entertainer, Bumbling Assistant and Line Manager: Discourses of Fatherhood in Parentcraft Texts. Discourse and Society. 11:2 pg 249 - 274.
Voestermans, P and Verheggen, T (2013). The Social Tuning of Behaviour. Wiley Blackwell: West Sussex/Netherlands.
