Boobs, boobs and more boobs.... An essay looking at language used around childcare

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.