HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: Why we can't have a 'civil' conversation about working mothers.

I have a few tightly-held life rules. 

Smile when you see people you love, even if you don't feel like it. 

Never, ever, ever ask anyone if they are pregnant. Or planning to be pregnant. Or hoping to be pregnant. 

Cheese beats chocolate. 

But I am about to break one of my most avowed principals. 

And it's this one: Never, ever, weigh in on a "mum debate".

While you're here, watch Laura Bryne articulating the contradiction of pressures that mothers face in their daily lives. Post continues after video.

A strange rule, perhaps, for someone who has written about parenting on the Internet many times, hosted a podcast about family life for years and has the average amount of thoughts about the eleventy-million issues I've encountered raising my own two children.

But broadly, I have managed to avoid calls on what constitutes a good mother. Those conversations, in my wide experience, help no-one. The only thing we can clearly agree on in the battlefields of this conflict is: It is much, much harder to achieve Good Mother status than it is to be deemed a Good Father. Their bar is over there, on the floor, splattered with wee.

Every mother I know is doing her damn best and let's leave the sledging to bad sportsmen, I say. 

But at Mamamia, over the past week or so, a "mum debate" has been raging that has sucked me in and ruffled me up.

Last Monday, Mia's interview with journalist Virginia Tapscott was published on our flagship interview show No Filter.

Virginia had written a widely-shared and thoughtful piece about why she had decided to pause her career and stop working outside the home while her four children are young.

I had already read that piece. I thought it was interesting and challenging. Virginia made the clear point that our society has ceased to value caregiving. That women had been convinced - essentially by capitalism - into believing they were only truly useful if they were working outside the home, making money for themselves and someone else. That our governments are overly focussed on subsidising child-care centres to nurture and educate children, rather than subsidising their primary caregiver to do it themselves. She argued that a progressive feminist movement should aim to support women in all their roles, not just the ones that encouraged them to be more "like men".

I fundamentally agree with all those statements.  

Virginia also went to great lengths to say that she didn't want working mothers to feel "stung" by what came next. But I'm afraid that didn’t stop my emotional response.

To argue against some of these conventions, Virginia questioned the idea state governments' new early childhood education policy, "Best Start" - ruling that children in both NSW and Vic will now get another year of schooling, from age four - isn't actually the best start at all. She said that actually, under-represented research shows that the optimum scenario for babies and preschoolers is to be at home with mum, almost all of the time.  

She talked about neuroscience, and not fighting nature.

"Thousands of years of evolution cannot be undone just because we've spent the past 50 years outsourcing childcare. Our babies and children do not suddenly evolve and adapt to this new model of care," Virginia wrote in her piece.

On No Filter, she told Mia that her own instinctive misery at dropping her first child at care led her to research why she felt that way. "If we take that away (children being cared for, non-stop, by their mother) even in degrees... I was still anecdotally being told that it has no impact, that only good can come from this... but if you take something away, and it doesn’t feel good and it’s upsetting for me and my baby how can it be good?"

"Lots of theories of mental health and psychology are grounded in the widely held belief that our brains are back in the Stone Age. Maybe in another couple of hundred thousand years they might evolve to be in more of an environment where we are now, but we can’t change it in our lifetime..."

On Instagram, Virginia writes, "It's misleading to argue that outsourcing childcare under the age of 3 years old is beneficial."

These comments shoved me out of my avoidant zone.

Just like Virginia, who is calling for more respect for care-givers, I have skin in this game.

I have been a working mother for 12 years, since my daughter was six months old. My partner (a man, let's call him Brent) took the next six months off paid work to care for her and after that, when she was one, she started family day care and remained there, three or four days a week, until she went to preschool at three and school at five. My son followed the same routine, two years later. 

The "choice" to work outside the home was never really a choice in our house, just as it isn't for most Australian parents. We need to earn money to pay for life and my partner certainly doesn't earn enough to do that alone. I had been working full time since I was 20. We scraped by on savings and some government subsidy in the time we weren't both in full-time work when the kids were babies. The idea that I might not go back to paid employment was never really entertained. Life, for the past 12 years, has been a busy blur of making it all work. Sometimes, it doesn't. Mostly, it does. 

Of course, I also love my children fiercely. I believe I prioritise their wellbeing and that they know how deeply we are connected, and that home is their safe place to land, always. Yes, these things feel redundant - but somehow important - to say.

Because there are culture wars. There are feminist skirmishes of all degrees. There are arguments about whether Beyonce should wear pants and whether high-profile women should declare their cosmetic surgery habits and whether it's okay for Kim Kardashian to question our collective work ethic. 

This debate is not that.

This debate - and a debate it is, as evidenced by the response from the Mamamia audience, who either felt profoundly seen by Virginia's comments, or profoundly offended - is not about us. 

It's about our children.

That's why it's almost impossible for it not to "sting". Why women are reluctant to report and debate contradictory research findings as if we were talking about choosing between Apple or Android.

There is no higher stakes discussion for a parent than whether or not she believes she is doing the best for her children. 

If, still in 2022, women have to justify their mothering model by suggesting that theirs is somehow superior to others, we have a problem. If, in order to advocate for parity and support for women we have to assert that our way of parenting is the best way, and others are not only wrong, but potentially dangerous and damaging, then we have lost on all sides.

I can present research, too. According to recent studies conducted by Kathleen McGinn, Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, working mothers are more likely to raise successful daughters and empathetic sons. The studies also found positive outcomes for working parents across a number of areas including: modelling behaviour, social interaction, independence and quality time.

Even a cursory search for findings on this topic will tell you that the benefits of early childhood education are lumpy, inconclusive. In some studies, kids who've been in care perform better in developmental milestones, yet may be more prone to some behavioural issues and minor illnesses. Others will say the opposite, that childcare benefits children's behaviour socially, and bolsters immune systems.

Funny thing, really, how you can usually find studies to support your point of view. 

Funny thing, too, how your life experience colours everything. 

My emotional response - I did get a bit unreasonably sweary on a bonus episode of Mamamia Out Loud this week - is informed not only by my mothering by my own experience of being raised by two working parents. And that the women in my family, like many others, have worked for generations. Both my grandmothers worked, and certainly their mothers before them.

It's a fallacy that it's only in the last 50 years that women have earned money outside the home. Working-class women have always worked. In my gran's day it was a privilege and a treasured status symbol afforded to few to "have a wife who 'could' stay at home" (which tells us a lot about why those attitudes have stuck around). 

These complex influences are one reason that otherwise sensible women get quite unhinged about this topic. Another is that for most of us, our choices - or, more likely, non-choices - have long since been made. Those early years have gone. The die is cast.  

It seems wild that in 2022, we're still arguing about whether working women are doing the best by their families.

We are continually fighting off the judgement that somehow a woman's paid work is a vanity project, a petty exercise in ego, rather than of equal importance to any male's. The intense mother guilt that we have all strained to slough off is sticking to us still, every time our lives are belittled in order to validate another.

After I listened to Virginia on No Filter, I thought a lot about what she'd said about the campaign for a basic living wage for carers. Yes, please. What equality for people doing some of the most important work it is possible to do.

Listen to this episode of No Filter where Mia speak with Virginia Tapscott about motherhood. Post continues after podcast.

After I listened to my friend and colleague Jessie Stephens discussing the "tension" that occurs when research clashes with your feminism, my shoulders got tight. It's not my feminism that sent me out to work when my daughter was six months old. It was my circumstances. It was who I was.

And after I listened again to the criticism of "Best Start" (a better name, perhaps, Dominic?) I began to look suspiciously at my own reality. Are my son's diagnoses the result of me abandoning him at home when he was so very little (answer, no). Is my teenager in her room right now, on Snapchat rather than reading the Brontes, because I've had a job her entire life? 

This spiralling is a symptom. 

It's why we can't have a "sensible" debate about female roles if we insist on framing them in a hierarchy of "best". If 100 per cent home-based parental care is the optimum, and everything else a sliding scale of sloppy seconds, we can't possibly keep the emotion out of this conversation.

The stakes are too high. 

Because if that is the framework we accept, it makes the majority of parents - let's just say mothers, because that's what we mean - selfish, short-sighted humans, who have been wilfully negligent of their primary responsibility because of their own shallow ambitions. 

That's not reality. 

Gah. I knew I should have followed my own damn rule.

Holly Wainwright is the Head Of Content at Mamamia, and an author. Her latest novel, The Couple Upstairs, is released on August 30. You can follow her on Instagram, here. And sign up for her newsletter, here.

Feature Image: Instagram @wainwrightholly.