The servitude of 'parenting without your people'
Do we treat parents with disregard in the West? And if so, are grandparents the solution?
Parenting in the West. Dream or Nightmare?
Recently a friend sent me this article about the difference between being a new mother in Switzerland and in Uganda. It’s a sobering reminder of how, in spite of our greater wealth, it can be tough and lonely parenting in the affluent West. Patience Akumu, the author, who grew up in Uganda, describes attempting to parent without her ‘people',’ once she’d moved to Switzerland, as ‘a nightmare.’
You can read her article here
As I read this, I felt a mix of things.
First, familiarity.
Applauding new parents
Akumu says she wanted cheering for getting to the bottom of the stairs without stepping on a toy. She was referencing the fact that mothers in Uganda are recognised and given credit by friends and family for the smallest of achievements.
The article reminded me of how I’d wanted cheering when I arrived home with my first new baby, but was met instead with chilly silence.
It was a cold dark night in mid January. As I got my new baby in her car seat out of the car, carried her up the four flights of stairs to our flat, I imagined a welcome party; bunting hanging from the windows, applause, music, congratulations. I’d gone through 36 hours of labour to bring a new human into the world and now I was bringing the new human home.
Surely I deserved a little cheer?
Instead, there was a dark flat, an empty fridge to fill, a cold bed, and that bewilderment new mothers feel when they realise they’re on their own. My parents were four hundred miles away. I remember staring into the Moses basket at my sleeping daughter (when my partner had gone out to buy food), and wondering, what do I do now?
The role of the grandparent
The next thing I felt, on reading Akumu’s article, was guilt. The baby in the Moses basket is now a mother herself. And yet had I made porridge to keep in a flask to feed her with each time she woke up to feed her new. baby in the early days of her new mothering? ( As Akumu describes mothers doing for their daughters in Uganda)? Had I even been in the same town as her in those early days?
No, I hadn’t.
It wasn’t a question of ‘I had to do it alone, so you can do it too.’
( In fact I had made a feeble attempt to bring soup to my daughter and her partner as a gesture on our first visit after the birth of their first baby, but was met with a rather luke warm response.
‘You didn’t need to make soup, we filled the freezer with meals from COOK..’
It wasn’t lack of gratitude on their parts, so much as lack of expectation.
It simply isn’t part of our culture to nurture new mothers. We don’t have a name for them as they do in Uganda, where, Akumu tells us, they are called ‘nakawere’. Nor do we (generally) regard new motherhood as a special condition requiring particular attention. My daughter hadn’t expected to be catered for, or to stay in bed for days, or to be treated with a special kind of respect, so had done the catering in advance.
Other grandparents have told me that while they wanted to help their child in the early days after giving birth, they were actively asked to remain at a distance, at least for the first few weeks, so the new parents could get to know their new babies as a couple. A new(ish) concept called ‘babymooning.’
I remember a few expectant grandparents at the ‘grantenatal’ class I attended talking with a kind of bewilderment about the way their children, the parents to be, had expressed a desire for ‘space’ once their baby was born.
It seems here in the West, many parents expect or even prefer to go it alone, perhaps not realising just how hard this can be.
Parents have to be everything to their kids in the West
As anyone who’s had kids knows, parenting doesn’t stop being demanding after the early weeks of babyhood.
Akumu writes;
(As parents of young children in Switzerland…) ‘We had to be teachers, chipping in with formal and informal education. There were no elder cousins to help with the homework or aunties to share folk tales that carried moral lessons. The system requires parents to be everything to their children and still somehow maintain a semblance of a sane life and career.’
Put like this, it really does make you question how parents in the West are able to keep it together at all.
Extended families
It’s easy to romanticise extended family networks and close communities when we don’t live in them ourselves. And we can’t turn the tide on so called ‘progress.’ Or base our parenting style on the way they do it in Uganda. It requires a ‘village’ to provide the sort of support Akumu talks about in her article. Along with extended families living close together, we jettisoned village support networks long ago in the West.
But Patience Akumu did live in an extended family network, in a culture where new mothers are revered and cared for, before she moved with her family to Switzerland, so is perfectly placed to compare the two systems.
And she’s convinced we in the West are getting it wrong.
Grandparental reserves
While most of my grandparent friends, ( and those I’ve spoken to for this substack) are in fact stepping in to try to fill this gap in support networks for parents, it often conflicts with other demands in their lives. We want to help, where we can. As I write, it’s half term and everywhere I looked today I saw grandparents with young children, either accompanying the parent of the children on some outing, or ushering them along through playgrounds and cafes on their own. Some of these grandparents looked happy ( usually those with the parents alongside) others looked, frankly, mildly terrified and completely exhausted!
But with most young parents needing to work full time, the question remains, who cares for the children before and after school, or during the school holidays, unless the grandparents step in?
Many grandparents in the West have other work and lives to live as well as being grandparents. Many of us are having to work for longer in order to get our pensions. Parents are having babies later so that older grandparents might find the sheer physical demands of helping out beyond them. Another article in the Guardian this week by the writer Adriene Mater explores the fact that many older people, those who’ve worked all their lives and done time caring for others, want to live an ‘obligation-free life.’ There is criticism for the pressure grandparents put on one another to be ‘good’ ie hands-on grandparents, as if there’s a moral value attached to helping out with their grandchildren for nothing. (I wrote a piece about the way grandparents sometimes judge one another here). Why do we do this?
Rewarding carework
Just as few mothers expect to be full time mothers and nothing else any more, grandmothers ( or grandfathers) don’t expect to be JUST grandmothers or grandfathers any more. ( As mentioned in the substack piece here).
But expecting young parents to manage everything, work, childcare, school holidays, all on their own is, as Akumu suggests, asking of them a kind of servitude.
If we can’t engineer a Ugandan way of life, what is the answer to the messy childcare picture we’ve created in the UK?
It always comes back to the need to give recognition and reward for care work. By valuing more highly what all carers do, (childcare workers, but also parents, and grandparents) by paying them properly and respecting the fact they are raising the generation, we begin to free up everyone.
Akumu says
‘No one explains ( when they talk of mothering in Africa) that the aggrandisement, such as the title nakawere and the care given to a new mother for up to a year after she has given birth, is community recognition and reward for women’s unpaid care work.’
We in the UK may not applaud new parents when they come home with their baby, or every time they pick up a toy off the floor, ( though perhaps we should!) but we can try to acknowledge, and respect the incredible work bringing up the new generation involves, by offering decent maternity and paternity leave, and possibly grandparental leave too as I believe they have trialled in Sweden.
There have to be other ways of making the lives of new parents easier, that don’t demand that grandparents give up everything they may have worked all their lives for.
It’s time to explore how they do it in other countries….
What do other grandparents think?
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Thank you. Happy Grandparenting!
Interesting to see if attitudes change as our birth rate continues to drop. What is happening in countries like Japan? Are parents feted more?