We Don't Like Children Anyhow

How reliance on the state is bred

After the celebrations of Mothering Sunday, what comes as a shock for the rest of the year for many women is just how much damage having children does to your life chances.

-Stella Creasy MP

It looks as though the next UK general election will be partly fought and won on the battleground of free childcare. Earlier this year the sitting Conservative government announced plans to expand taxpayer-funded childcare to working parents of two-year-olds (childcare being currently subsidised by the state for children aged three and above); now Labour is seeking to outdo them by commissioning an expert to investigate how to integrate free childcare into existing schools. This has clearly been identified as a way of winning the votes not just of women, but men with families - and particularly the kind of swing voter who politicians usually target with ‘retail policies’ (i.e., giveaways) like this one.

Mary Harrington has already written an excellent piece on what might be called the demand side of the equation, and I urge you to read it. Her point, in brief, is that while female politicians and Guardian journalists might have an issue with how having children ‘forces’ women to quit work or shift to part-time employment patterns, most women - like most men - don’t actually like their jobs and are perfectly happy to spend less time working. Moreover, most women, having chosen to have children, actually - shock! horror! - love their offspring and like spending time with them.

All I would really add to this is that the picture is therefore much more complicated than what the Fawcett Society describes, with women clamouring to avoid being ‘consigned to the mummy track’ so that they can have wonderful, sparkling careers. No doubt this is true of a minority (I know some of them). But it is probably more realistic to say that the issue is rather simply that most married couples rely on having two incomes, and can’t therefore afford for one of the two (realistically almost always the mother) to stop working in order to look after the kids. It is only really this that in general makes taxpayer-subsidised childcare attractive - not that it frees women up to become the 60-hour-a-week-working girlbosses they have always longed to be. Almost nobody, male or female, actually wants that kind of lifestyle, and almost all parents, male or female, would rather spend time with their kids than working if asked. It’s just that no government is in a position to think creatively or act decisively about how to solve the underlying problem, which is the almost total requirement in Western societies for both people in a stable couple to work in order to make ends meet (more on this in a moment).

But that’s the demand side, and it’s the supply side I am here chiefly interested in. I have written before, on many occasions, about the basic dynamic of modern government, and the basic relationship which the State posits between itself and the individual (see for example here, here, here and here). In short, since modern government cannot plead divine right, or indeed hereditary status, to justify its existence, it can only do so by making the population reliant upon it for the blessings which it bestows upon them. Its rationale, in other words, has necessarily to be that of Machiavelli’s prince:

‘[A] wise ruler must think of a method by which his citizens will need the state and himself at all times and in every circumstance. Then they will always be loyal to him.’

It probably hardly needs spelling out that this provides a ready account as to why free childcare is something which governments (and opposition parties) find it natural and straightforward to reach for when making policy promises in the lead up to an election. Free childcare comes at a cost. But it cements the relationship of reliance which has slowly been built up between State and population over time. It does this by making working parents reliant upon the State to subsidise their lifestyles, of course. But it has the further benefit of making children reliant upon the State, as well. A generation of children who have been raised by taxpayer-funded childcare assistants rather than parents is a generation of children who are used to looking to public authority for succour - and who will be much more likely to rely on the State themselves when it is their turn to bear offspring twenty or thirty years down the line. This has a self-perpetuating logic which it is difficult for the State to ignore.

And there is also, of course, a further benefit, which is that taxpayer-funded childcare ‘vulnerablises’ the family. The modern State’s primary, foundational enemy is the family, because the family unit - the natural unit on which human flourishing is built - is capable of supporting itself without the State’s help. It is therefore an anathema, and anything which undermines its independence is understood almost intuitively to those imbued with ‘political reason’ (e.g., Stella Creasy) to be an inherent good. Taxpayer-funded childcare does this quite neatly by providing a discourse of the family as a fragile, fundamentally economically inefficient (not to mention patriarchal and oppressive) institution which can only be made viable through generous subsidy. This message, transmitted unthinkingly and almost entirely accidentally, is one which politicians naturally embrace; not because of grand conspiracy or dark motives, but simply because they are necessarily engaged in the State’s great project: finding ways to make the population reliant upon it.

What we call ‘the State’, in other words, is the product of political incentives, the most basic of which being the drive to win the loyalty of the population through the creation of a relationship of need. This is not planned, or deliberate: it is simply the way of modern governance, and the reason why we tend to be governed by people who naturally and intuitively come up with wheezes like ‘free childcare for two-year-olds’ when pressed for ideas for election-winning promises. Earlier on, I observed that no government appears willing to even talk about, let alone confront, the fact that the conditions of modern life seem to force all couples, whether they want to or not, into the ‘dual income’ imperative; here again the explanation is obvious. Politicians have no incentive to think creatively in that way, because their instincts are naturally aligned towards the opposite requirement: they get to the top by reinforcing the relationship of need, not dismantling it - and much of modern politics can indeed be understood through this simple heuristic.