Last week Amelia Gentleman wrote in The Guardian about ‘the great nursery debate’, assessing the evidence that being left in group care can have a damaging effect on young children. As soon as I saw the headline I could predict at least one name that would turn up: Oliver James, prominent psychologist and writer.
Meeting James over coffee, it did not surprise me that his was the most ardent voice in Gentleman’s article. He is nothing if not confident in his opinions.
Best known for his pre-crunch anti-consumerist diatribe ‘Affluenza’, his latest book, ‘How Not to F*** Them Up’, dives into the knee-high world of toddlers and their upbringing. In it he argues that meeting the needs of under-threes, best accomplished by full-time individual care, is a crucial point in reducing emotional distress in the Western world.
Much of the problem in modern childcare issues results from the way feminism developed in the UK, James adds. “Nobody asked the question: what the hell are we going to do with the babies?”
He argues that the media gives an unrealistic picture to would-be career mothers of the situation: “The prevailing idea that women of a certain level of education will be a miserable minority if they give up work to have children is simply not true.” He admits, though, that one should not simply encourage all mothers to stay at home. In fact, from his observations and interviews with women he identifies three attitudes to motherhood, which he labels ‘huggers’, ‘fleximums’ and ‘organizers’. I remind myself that he is a psychologist, and labelling is what they do.
He continues, “around a quarter of women are ‘organizers’, whose lives are not designed to have a baby in them. They may well be better off staying in their careers and having a full time career for their child – or better yet – having their husband stay at home.”
James acknowledges that this is simply not possible for those on a certain income, which is why he has repeatedly set out in his books that the best use of government money would be to pay everyone with children the equivalent of the average wage so that one partner – or a single mother – can stay at home full-time. On top of this, the greatest social change we could achieve, he states, would be for fathers to begin taking on toddler childcare in equal proportion to mothers. But he is skeptical about this change occurring: “An awful lot of men go coochy-coo, but they still have a desire to go and be breadwinners.”
He talks about the example of Scandinavian countries where the men – because of various factors including much stricter political correctness laws – are far more ‘feminine’ than in the UK.
Beyond this, James’ overriding point is that “we need a society that puts emotional wellbeing ahead of the profits of a tiny minority.” But he is quick to isolate the difficulty in this aim: how does one achieve emotional well-being? Of all the mothers he met for his latest book, he found only one who seemed to have managed it; the description is not promising for the average female university goer. All this woman had ever wanted was to get married and have children, and she had achieved it. She was also very attractive, though James insists he thinks this had little to do with her contentment.
While not completely agreeing with me on this, James does emphasise the importance of being able to live in the moment. “The problem with this is that for both of us – and probably most people reading this – is that [higher] education in modern life encourages the very opposite: dissociation, and a tendency towards hyper-critical responses. Most high achievers are basically personality disordered people whose achievement is countering feelings of personal lack of worth…pretty much everyone in Oxford is using cleverness as a defence.” No wonder we like a drink.
What’s more, James apoints out that the current system is not only cruel but ineffectual: “It doesn’t work at all – with grade inflation Oxbridge finds it ever harder to select pupils, and once you get your first how is the man at Morgan Stanley to decide which of the Oxbridge wankers to give a job to to rip off the next
generation?” His eloquent argument points to the need for not only a more nuanced testing system, but the encouragement of more varied life goals.
James believes greater wellbeing comes from stepping back a little from the competition; though, he concedes that this is more difficult when the financial future looks bleak. But there is hope. James thinks that, “just as now neo-liberalism is the total orthodoxy, in 50 years times zero growth will be seen as a good thing.”
So we return to the importance of caring for the under-threes: if we are going to raise a generation of non-materialists, we must give them comfort and satiety in their early years. To do this, James says we need fundamental change in how women – and potentially men – approach having a family. In preparing for that we can learn to readdress some other values, like planning to earn what we need rather than what we want. We also need to work out what are going to be the things that give intrinsic value to life rather than those signifiers of status – whether it be money, power or even the ostentations of intelligence – that we could do without.
