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Programmed to feel guilty, constantly feeling they're not doing a good job of either being a mother or a career woman, pulled in several directions at once - working mothers do it hard.
But, the mums who went through it 20 to 30 years ago recall the era when lobby groups campaigned to keep women at home and when the choice of childcare ranged from dismal to middling.
Still, they say, they got through it, and so did their children, none the worse for wear. The grown-up generation, now in their 20s and 30s, say they can remember little about pre-school years anyway and don't consider they missed out on much during their childhood by having both parents at work.
"The life you have is the only one you know," says Paul, a 32-year-old health worker whose mother worked almost fulltime from the time he was born.
"Unless comparisons are thrust in your face, you don't experience a lack. We used to get home from school, eat muesli, do our own thing or watch TV until mum came home. I used to go to friends' houses sometimes after school, and it never struck me that I was missing out on anything."
Paul, now a father and part-time worker himself, is sharing the upbringing of his baby daughter with his wife. But he has nothing against good daycare centres, he says, and is in fact considering organising some hours for his daughter, so that she will become socialised with other children.
Jenny Keown's mother Anne went back to work as a part-time teacher when Keown was just a few months old. She remembers little of her very early years but does recall being picked up from morning kindergarten in Havelock North by a young woman on a bicycle. Together they rode back to Hastings until her father came home from work to collect her.
Keown, 28, now a business journalist in Auckland, is in awe of what her mother achieved, bringing up two daughters while both parents taught at the local high school.
But, she admits, she can remember being stubborn and difficult about helping out with chores and wishing that her mother could have been at home with baking after school like other friends' mothers.
Keown used to walk from her primary school through the school grounds to the adjoining high school and wait with the other children of teachers in the staffroom or in the carpark.
She noticed at a young age that her mother couldn't always bake for the school fair or help in the classroom.
"I found that a little hard. I missed that. But I did sport at the weekends, and they would watch me. That was enough for me."
And now she looks back at the benefits. "I learned to be independent. My sister Linda and I learned to bake biscuits at an early age," she laughs. "And it has made me value my career."
She also learned discipline. With two high school teachers in the household, dinner was for eating and socialising, and afterwards the house fell quiet as Keown and her sister Linda got on with their homework, and their parents got on with marking and class preparation.
"If I had my time again, I wish I had been an easier child and helped mum more. At some stage, I realised I felt really proud of her, that she was an awesome mum, and she was helping to earn money to pay for holidays together."
But talk to that first generation who used fulltime care and it is the mothers who say they missed out and spent years wracked with guilt, bundling their children off while they went to work. Working mums now in their 40s and 50s spoken to by the Herald on Sunday agreed: not having the time to do parent-help at school, not being able to watch every school running race, not being around when a toddler learned a new skill - that's what was missing.
Anne Keown says she missed out on "guilt-free motherhood". "There was never time to do parent-help or attend school sports during the day. I was always torn. I always felt a bit of a bad mother."
She relied on help from friends who did not work and on her parents, who also lived in Hastings. The worst times were when the girls were sick and she felt bad about having to go to work.
"I'd ring my mother and say 'Could you put the electric blanket on? I'm bringing Linda or Jenny across'."
While Anne Keown is pleased she continued with her career as a teacher, she thinks the feminist message of the 70s that it was possible for women to have it both ways was "a have".
"The idea was that you would come home from work and spend quality time with the children. But you are always tired, and the quality time is on the parents' terms, not necessarily the child's."
Paul's mother Estelle brought up two sons mostly on her own and remembers feeling constantly stressed, always running late and repeatedly telling her children to hurry up and finish eating or get dressed.
"I could never just let them do things in their own time. And we'd be all dressed, ready to go for the day, and one of them would be sick or spill something on themselves."
Now in her 50s, she regrets never having had the time to just "hang out" with her children as she does now with her grandchildren.
Instead, she worked to give them a lifestyle - sailing lessons, holidays at the beach.
But the practicalities of everyday life were tough. She remembers working for a company in which she was the only one with children and the stress of trying to meet the 5.30pm deadline to pick them up from daycare before penalties began. Sickness in the household became a problem when holiday allowances had run out. Her already busy mother would look after the children at her home nearly an hour's drive away.
Paul has a vague recollection of as an older child being sick at home alone and his mother coming home from work at lunchtime to visit him. But again, he says, that memory doesn't bother him.
But Estelle remembers reading something another son had written when he was still at primary school.
"He wrote: 'When I got sick, my mother was too busy to look after me and sent me to my grandmother. My grandmother cooked nice meals.' I thought, oh my God, this is all my son remembers of his childhood?"
At one stage, when the university creche was full, Estelle had to find an alternative daycare for her youngest son.
The solution was Ambler and Co, a clothing company with a factory on Auckland's Great North Rd. The company, progressive in its childcare policies even by today's standards, decided the way to attract and keep women workers was to provide good childcare. The first centre opened in their Browns Bay factory in 1969, another in Glen Eden two years later and a third in King St, off Great North Rd, in 1976. It was here that Estelle took her youngest son.
The reason for the subsidised daycare centres was quite simple, says Ambler and Co chief executive David Ambler.
"We needed staff, and a lot of the women had young kids and they needed to have somewhere to put them."
Estelle remembers her youngest son being so happy to go to the Ambler daycare that she worried he was not sufficiently bonded with her.
"He adored this woman at daycare. He used to take a photo of her to bed with him, and I worried that he was more bonded with her than me."
The Ambler daycare centres closed in the 80s and the King St facility, which still exists today, was bought by a private company.
These days parents have a wide choice, but back in the 70s, not only were there not many options, but society aimed a collective frown on women who worked fulltime and put their children in care.
Estelle recalls the New Zealand Playcentre Federation campaigning "viciously" against working mothers at a time when the Government was considering putting funding into daycare to improve education standards and training.
"There were some dreadful daycares around. I don't mean abuse but simple lack of training. I remember thinking it was alright for these middle-class people to tell us to stay at home and look after our children, but I couldn't afford to. The DPB was never an option for me. And with this campaign, they were denying my children the right to a better standard of daycare."
Otago Emeritus Professor Anne Smith also remembers the Playcentre campaign.
Arriving back in New Zealand with two pre-school children in 1974, after completing her PhD in Canada, she needed to find a daycare centre in Dunedin in order to take up a job offer at Otago University.
The Playcentre Federation conducted a "strident" campaign around the country, she says, "making women who worked feel guilty for putting their children in childcare".
Smith, a research fellow in early childhood education, remembers searching in vain for a decent facility in Dunedin back in the 70s.
"There was very little choice. The university creche in Dunedin used to encourage people to leave their children just for as long as a lecture. The children never really had a chance to settle in and it wasn't a learning environment. You couldn't expect it to be. There was no training."
Changes began happening in the 80s with improved training and standards, and childcare transferred from the social welfare portfolio to the Ministry of Education.
"From then it was recognised that it [childcare] was about children's learning even though there wasn't much change in funding," Smith says.
Since then there have been huge improvements in teacher training and adult/child ratios.
"We have a lot of kids in care [in New Zealand] and most of it is very good."
From research Smith has conducted and studied over the years she, like others in her field, concludes that the long-term effects of children in daycare are positive as long as the quality of care is good.
Children from low income homes develop very well in a good quality early child environment, she says.
Daycare adult/child ratios need to be small, staff training needs to be good and the group sizes not too large.
"Little children don't flourish in large groups," she says.
Her views are echoed by Linda Mitchell, senior researcher for the New Zealand Council for Educational Research who has been involved in early childhood education for 25 years.
The latest research both in New Zealand and internationally indicates that all children benefit from either full time or, at least, some hours of pre-school education each week, she says. Pre-school education from an early age not only improved skills such as maths and literacy in later school years, she says, but it helps put in place good learning habits and skills which will benefit the child through- out her or his school life.
Childcare: the facts
* Longitudinal research in New Zealand and overseas, following groups of children through pre-school and school years, shows that good quality pre-school education benefits both the children and their families.
* Good quality pre-school education, found in good daycare centres, contributes to cognitive, or academic, outcomes later in the child's life.
* Early childhood education helps establish learning skills such as perseverance, motivation and good attitudes to learning which are beneficial throughout the child's school years.
* Young children left for long hours in low quality daycare can be negatively affected, although current research indicates that those effects are not long term and can be reversed by a change to good quality care.
