storbarnsförälder

I hope that the mother feels relief that the children are okay and horror at what might have happened and not anger at being arrested.

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-- "I wonder have they any other parent"

By definition, yes.

-- "and will that other parent also be charged."

Ha!

Just, Ha!

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I dunno... I mean if Parent A says to Parent B "you go out to work and I'll look after the children" is Parent B responsible for Parent A's negligence (should Parent B have realised that Parent A would be negligent?)? Or if Parents A and B are divorced/separated and the court awarded custody to Parent A is Parent B responsible? or the court that decided to give Parent A the custody responsible?

Of course if Parent A expected Parent B to be home, but Parent B was for some reason not home and Parent A needed to leave, well then Parent B would have rather more to answer for.

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ailbhe

Why not anger? Anger at herself, at the people arresting her, at the people who didn't help her care for three very young children, at the system which leaves women alone with small children for days and days because childcare is so expensive and generally expected to be paid for *entirely* from the "second" salary, not half from each of two salaries... Anger at the health visitor system which didn't recognise her desperation, anger at a *thousand* things.

Relief and horror too, yeah.

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ailbhe

If Parent Male says "I've worked hard all week while you stayed at home and did nothing, I'm off to the football," is Parent Female morally obliged to suck it up and continue to take sole responsibility for the minute-to-minute safety and wellbeing of the children?

There are *lots* of reasons women are usually the ones getting charged with child neglect while men don't. Part of that is that men can and do opt out much earlier on, knowing women will pick up the slack.

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That's true; I don't think that women should be required/expected to provide all of the child care all of the time at all; I do think men shouldn't be opting out of child care.

I guess my social circle contains few parents, and two families where the father does all or most of the parenting; which is probably a rather larger proportion of men-as-main-parent families than is actually the case in the wider world; maybe I'm over-optimistically thinking that in any case where the mother does most/all of the parenting that that was her active choice.

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rmc28

in any case where the mother does most/all of the parenting that that was her active choice

Aha ahahaha.

Now, I think

fanf and I are fairly equitable on overall division of labour, but even so I do well over half the childcare, especially at weekends. There are at least two ways in which it's easier for Tony to opt-out than it is me:

1. He wakes up slower than I do, and goes back to sleep easily, so at weekends I generally leap out of bed to supervise the roaming child and unless I go back and nag, I don't have any help until Tony joins the land of the awake people. I don't like nagging, so I save it for when I really need him to wake up and help. I can't play defect in the way I could when it was just two of us, because Charles will suffer if I do.

2. He can work late because I don't charge him for childcare if he's late home; I can't work late because the childminder will charge us for childcare if I am late to collect Charles.

This is not me having a go at Tony, but these are two ways in which it's really easy for us to slip into an unequitable division of labour, and we both have to actively tackle it by making sure Tony pulls his weight at other times and in other ways, and by keeping up the communication without resentment and strife creeping in. We're successful more often than we're not, but it's a constant thing.

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These issues clearly exist, and it is a shame that they do. I really don't know (and have no experience of) to what extent they are a matter of having chosen something that maybe didn't work out as well as it might and to what extent they are a matter of being forced into something unsuitable for your wishes by social custom. Clearly vastly more women end up doing the parenting than men do; so I guess that unless I want to conclude that women "just naturally love raising kids" social pressure and expectations are obviously a big part of it.

I like to think that if I had kids (hahahahaha no) I wouldn't fall for that pressure; I have a strong desire to not get out of bed early, or go to work early (in such a way as to end up with child-picking-up-duty by staggering working hours for instance)... However somehow I have absorbed the idea that unwillingness to cope with a lot of early mornings is a Reason Not To Have Children rather than, say, a reason to find a partner who likes early mornings with whom to have children. I certainly grew up with the notion that Mummies do All The Parenting, stupid social expectations (get them out of my head).

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I hear where you are coming from but surely the time for anger was earlier and not upon returning home to discover that society has finally 'worked' and saved the lives of your children.

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1. He wakes up slower than I do, and goes back to sleep easily, so at weekends I generally leap out of bed to supervise the roaming child and unless I go back and nag, I don't have any help until Tony joins the land of the awake people. I don't like nagging, so I save it for when I really need him to wake up and help. I can't play defect in the way I could when it was just two of us, because Charles will suffer if I do.

I really admire the way you run your life and I consider you a positive role model. However, I'd like to call you on this. There must be ways in which you can make Tony sleeping in his problem and not yours if you both really wanted to. Could you get Charles when he wakes up and deposit him in bed with Tony and decamp to a spare bed/the sofa to sleep some more?

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rmc28

Also I am that rare category of mother who out-earns the father, and did so before getting pregnant. This put me in a much better position to argue the "we need to divide childcare equitably" than if I was earning less, as is often the case.

The seeing childcare as coming out of the 'second' salary problem comes out of viewing household finances as only made up of 2 full-time salaries, and of course as viewing the money as the only measure, rather than the happiness. Plenty of people would take a reduction in salary over being happy (e.g. Parent High-Earner works a 4-day week and Parent Low-Earner works a 2-3 day week and childcare is covered out of the joint account and everybody is a bit poorer and a lot happier).

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ailbhe

Well yes, and the time for my cousin's husband to realise that postnatal depression and psychosis is a real illness should have been *before* his wife and child died of it. People fuck up, and it's not usually because they are evil people who wanted to harm their children.

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And leads to the dreaded "but you earn less than childcare would cost, so you clearly should do the childcare yourself!" argument; which makes some financial sense but doesn't at all address the happiness question. And why, oh why, is childcare so expensive? (well, yes, skilled job and all that... but why can't it be subsidised?).

I think I'm probably just lucky that I plain old don't like babies and am not facing making my way through all of this.

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rmc28

I could and on occasion I have, if I really need the sleep. It's making Charles stay there when he'd rather be in his room or the living room ;)

I've been working hard over the last year to make sure I call Tony on his lie-ins when they bug me, and also prioritising my own rest more highly. We are both happiest on the days when he gets up at a reasonable time without me having had to ask, and that's the goal I'm working towards, having that kind of day every Saturday/Sunday.

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Oh well, thank you very much society for not being there for all the days, weeks, months and years that I needed your support caring for my children. Your five minutes of heroism are clearly enough for me to curtail my totally rational and elective decision to be angry.

The time to be angry is when you're angry. Also, notice that once "society worked", as you put it, the outcome for the woman is arrest, not free childcare. So, er, yeah. I'd be angry too.

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The problem is that you don't know that any of those scenarios, or a million other comparable scenarios, is what actually happened. All you know is that there are these 3 kids, who it took more than one person to make, but there is only one person being punished for not taking care of them properly, and that person is the mother.

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We also don't know if a father was ever declared legally registered as the father (or known to be the father by the mother), or if it was a sperm donation, or if the father is dead...

What we do know is that the reporters have failed to report adequately on this aspect (where is the father and what is to be done about him not having been there); which is useless of them (unfortunately not actually shocking).

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Point taken.

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Actually I don't think that the newspapers are, to their own system, being negligent here. They are reporting what they see as the salient facts: the mother failed to be there at all times with her children. Bad mothering (or the appearance of bad mothering) is news. Bad fathering is dog bites man.

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Point taken. I didn't mean to cause offence. I just can't imagine doing that but I also can't imagine what happened to your cousin. I think I need to learn to count my blessings for that.

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