Mom Guilt is Cheaper Than Quality, Affordable Childcare

This week, my nanny unexpectedly quit. She’s moving across town and doesn’t want to do the commute anymore. I complain about this to my husband and he says, “Do you want me to just hire a nanny?” 

Um, sure honey. “Just” hire a nanny. Go ahead. Call the organizations. Set up the interviews. Get on more waitlists. Put an ad on Birdie Break (Uber for childcare) and hope someone responds. Send dozens of messages to people on a paid site like care.com (Tinder for childcare) who don’t respond to you (so, Tinder for childcare). Hire someone through Facebook who then ghosts you. Find someone who is mediocre just in time for them to quit despite the careful contract you wrote because, to be fair, childcare work is hard and doesn’t pay very well. Trying to find childcare is way harder and more anxiety-inducing than I ever expected it would be. And the real kicker is that this is expressly, explicitly, my problem. 

It’s my problem because I am a woman. That is: I am the gestational parent—I am the one that nurses, the one the baby is more attached to, the one that is more anxious about his care. I also mean that I’ve been raised as a woman in a society that has a very old, very deep hate for femininity, regardless of the sex of the person expressing that femininity. I am also the lower income earner in my household, which is statistically true for a lot of people in this country who align with the term “woman.” Hiring help is so expensive that it often makes more financial sense for us lower earners to stay home rather than pay for childcare. Not to mention that finding childcare is work: while I am writing ads, researching day homes, interviewing people, and trying to set up a payment system for the nanny who worked all of three weeks, I am not putting time into my business or my counseling degree.

When my baby finally goes to bed for the night, I lie down, exhausted, and scroll Instagram. This is supposed to make me feel better. It does not. Here is what I get out of it: 

Sleep training will traumatize your baby. If you do it, you’re a bad mom.

Your baby should sleep through the night naturally, with no interventions. If they don’t, you must be a bad mom.

Daycare will traumatize your baby. If you send them away, you’re a bad mom.

Breast is best. 

Fed is best, but really breast is best and if you don’t breastfeed you’re a bad mom. 

If you let your baby even look at a bottle, you’ll ruin breastfeeding forever because you’re a bad mom. 

Babies are humans that can eat normal things, except that good moms bake sugar-free, salt-free muffins and spend the day trying to think through the whir of a blender.

Narrate absolutely every thing you do or your baby won’t learn to speak English. 

If you let your baby see a screen, even in passing, they’ll be an idiot and it will be all your fault. 

You should be able to do all this yourself and feel good about it. If you need help, you’re a bad mom. 

You get the message. It’s this:

If you feel guilty enough about every detail of your child’s health and wellbeing, you’ll stay home to micromanage your children’s care instead of going to work. That means the government does not have to pay for quality, affordable childcare.  

I knew having a kid would change my life. I knew it would be hard. I knew the statistics on working women and children. In her book All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister points out that, based on wage data between 1979 and 2006, “on average, men saw a six percent increase in earnings after becoming fathers; in contrast, women's wages decreased four percent for every child.” This is American data, and things are undoubtedly better for women in Canada in terms of parental leave and some subsidization for care, but the Royal Bank of Canada did a study that found the same thing: mother incomes drop for a full five years after having a baby, while father incomes only rise.

The upshot of all this, that I am still wrapping my head around, is that I have to pay to work. Yes, of course my husband and I are a team, and his earnings obviously benefit me and the baby greatly. But that makes his work indispensable, and mine disposable.

The going rate for a nanny or babysitter is around $20/hour, while daycares generally cost over $1000/month (depending on your province; Quebec is doing a lot better than the rest of us). You know how much full-time care costs in Sweden? $200/month. Even less if you are a lower-income person. You know how much it costs in France? Free. Zero dollars. 

Excuse my incredulity here. I know a lot of you know this already. But here’s the thing—the incredible and impossible pressure to be a mom correctly isn’t really a thing in France. According to Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman, an American raising her kids in France, the culture simply isn’t like that there. Everyone agrees on the general strategy of raising kids. They don’t need huge controversies in the comments section about sleep training or baby-led weaning. Druckerman writes: 

The French have managed to be involved without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there's no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents." one Parisian mother tells me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time.”

I do not think the presence of high-quality, accessible child care in France and the absence of obsessive mom guilt is an accident. When childcare is affordable and available, mothers do not have to be seduced out of the workforce by the Sisyphean challenge of being a perfect mom. 

It was back in 1963 that Betty Friedan wrote about the feminine mystique, which is a sort of cultural pressure for women to not only be at home but to like it there. It was an era of complicated home-cooked meals, overnight makeup, and an expectation of deep satisfaction in waxing the kitchen floors. Friedan wrote, 

In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a necessary pressure to remove women from the workforce and get them back in the home so that the men who were returning from the war could have their jobs back. 

Now, I shouldn’t really be writing about Betty Friedan. She was a second-wave feminist, concerned mostly with middle-class white women, and there was a lot missing in her view. We’ve theoretically evolved a lot as a society since then, and unquestionably things are better for women now than they used to be. 

So why is my Instagram full of recipes for plant-based baby muffins, homemade Halloween costumes, and extremely shiny kitchen floors? Why is the expectation that we should breastfeed 24/7 for as long as possible even when it hurts and we hate it? Why are we supposed to give birth like earth mothers who experience labour as one long orgasm and are failures of humanity if we need an intervention like a c-section or an induction? 

The Canadian government is aware of this problem. The 2021 budget under Trudeau has a plan to implement $10/day childcare within the next five years. That will mean a lot more women getting paid a lot more money for the work of caring for little ones. It also means a lot more women earning and spending, and our economy will only improve. So why has it taken so long for our government to take this issue on? And do we really think this is going to happen? 

I don’t think anyone is sitting around explicitly trying to prevent women from accessing economic power. But disempowering women and feminine people financially (and in many other ways) is embedded in the history of our culture. Whether anyone is intending it or not, mom guilt is a tool to keep women in the job of childcare, if not out of other kinds of jobs. It is a tool to keep us feeling powerless. 

I keep thinking about the research that shows that, whatever the situation is in terms of a mother working or staying at home, it’s only good for the children if she is happy with that situation. If she wants to stay home and is happy with that arrangement, the kids are happy. If she wants to work full time and is happy doing that, the kids are happy. There is a mountain of research showing that angry, depressed, and resentful parents aren’t great for kids’ development. Supporting parents undoubtedly helps us have a healthier next generation. 

So the next time you find yourself obsessing about your milk production or how much sodium your baby is getting or whether or not you are connecting deeply enough with them, ask yourself: who benefits from all this guilt and shame? 

Then ask yourself: What do you need? What support do you have available to get those needs met? What would it feel like to assume your desire for space, naps, fitness, work, and whatever else you need was not only normal but actively subsidized by the government? 

We can’t fix our country’s childcare problems just by thinking about them. These are real problems and we should be getting angry (and voting) about them. But in the meantime, understanding mom guilt as a tool of oppression rather than as a true reflection of our failures can be really helpful in taking the pressure off. I know it’s a lot easier to talk about letting go than to actually do it, but I say this to myself as I say it to you: this guilt isn’t really yours. It’s meant to keep you small. It might be uncomfortable to get your needs met as a human person and as a parent, but it only benefits you and your precious babies when you do.