It’s time to listen to mainstream Britain, and defend a mother’s right to stay at home for longer
by David Goodhart, Conservative Home:
During a general election, the family is repeatedly invoked by all parties. The real family gets almost no attention in the 2017 party manifestos, including the Conservative one.
Yet you do not have to be an old-school traditionalist to wonder whether many of our contemporary problems do not have at least some root in a neglect of the private realm.
Consider this list: the crisis in social care, thanks in part to the decline in family obligation; the housing crisis, exacerbated by the decline of the stable two-parent family; the over-dependence on immigration, because of the economic and cultural bias against larger families; the rise of stress and mental illness, especially among young women; the persistence of gender pay inequality, and the difficulty of recruiting people to caring jobs because they are so undervalued.
A central challenge of modern politics is how to restore dignity and prestige to the domestic realm – which means one parent, usually a mother, being able to afford to stay at home for longer – without reversing the advances in women’s equality and autonomy of the past generations.
Yet all the water is still flowing against domesticity.
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