Money, mothers, work and children

By PAULA OLIVER

It came down to money when Clara Knox decided to return to work just nine weeks after having her first child. The family needed the cash.

Every morning at 7, she would take her son to her sister's home, complete with clothes, medicine, food and anything else little Jean-Luc might need.

"I couldn't stay off work any longer. It was really hard. Physically, I was like a balloon when I returned."

Like many New Zealanders, Knox, now 36, and her husband, Pat, chose to wait until their late 20s to have children. She found it hard to adjust to returning to her administration job to supplement her husband's income, but there was little choice.

Their experience is not uncommon. Overseas research shows that increasing numbers of women are going back to work shortly after childbirth because they need the money.

Locally, fresh research on women's reasons for returning to work is scarce. It is hoped that a raft of new surveys will follow the Government's introduction of 12 weeks' paid parental leave.

But anecdotal evidence - from childcare workers, mothers and organisations in the employment field - suggest that the trend of a money-driven return to work is prevalent here too. Some women are determined to get back to their jobs, others simply feel they have to.

A rising cost of living means that one income is often not enough to cover a home and a family.

A healthy and balanced diet for a family of four costs $230 a week depending on where you live, says an Otago University study. The cost of renting a home has risen, with the national median rent reaching $200 a week in this year's Massey University Residential Rental Market report.

After housing, sole-parent families can be left with less than $200 a week. Low-income families struggling to meet a mortgage also look to a second income to get by.

But the financial squeeze does not always mean mothers are catapulted out to work against their will.

There can also be a very different outcome - mothers who stay at home with their kids because it's just not worth going to work. And in better-off families there seems to be a trend - again the research is lacking - where some women are rejecting the stress of doing it all in favour of taking time out to enjoy motherhood.

The decisions being made by the country's mothers and families are delicately balanced.

Childcare costs, Government policy, feminist ideas, the structure of childcare, education and traditional values all join money in the overall juggling act.

Many mothers still opt to stay home and make everything fit around that choice.

But Auckland University sociologist Professor Maureen Baker says there is increasing pressure on women to go back to work, or to stay at work after having a child.

A man living in the 1950s was likely to be able to cover a home and support his wife and family on one income, she says. Now that is impossible.

Add to that a growing feeling in society that being a housewife no longer cuts the mustard.

Then there is the fact that many women with a tertiary education don't want to stay at home changing nappies.

"You can go from a job with pay, getting pay rises, to someone who looks after preschool children. That can be very rewarding, but the rewards are intangible. It's not obvious like a pay rise," Baker says.

Georgie Bailey, 28, is one of those who happily opted to stay at home with her first child, Melissa. She and husband Andrew, 27, were the first in their group of friends to get married and to have a child.

Bailey had worked as a nanny and was six months off finishing teacher training when the unplanned pregnancy happened.

"We sort of blindly went into it. We'd never really budgeted, although we had saved for our wedding. We had always lived on one income. We were students when we married."

The couple discovered they would be financially better off if she did not work and supplemented her husband's relatively low income with family support benefits.

"You need a well-paid job to make it work, and I couldn't get one with the training I had. I would also have had the stress of knowing someone else was looking after my kids," Bailey says. "No one else could ever put in as much time, effort as I could. I had always been a homemaker type and knew that's what I wanted."

The cost of childcare in New Zealand was recently shown in a study to be higher than in every OECD country except Britain. A number of mothers who talked to the Herald said they investigated childcare but found it too expensive. They were put in a Catch-22 situation where their earnings completely disappeared into care.

Others were reluctant to put their children in the care of strangers.

The Herald's special poll (see panel on next page) shows that a quarter of women consider children should not be put in care at all and more than a fifth say not before one year. Yet many women are returning to work much sooner.

For those needing to use childcare services, subsidies are available for low-income families and people on benefits, but experts argue that the level of help lags behind countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Canada.

But that may change. Prime Minister Helen Clark stated during her election campaign that the maximum number of subsidised childcare hours would be increased in the next three years to support parents who wanted to move off benefits. Increasing childcare support and giving tax breaks to families was also a platform of the United Future party.

Some mothers have avoided the dilemma of costly childcare by adopting flexible work hours. But for those on the career ladder, this is often not an option.

Stacey Rusbatch, 33, took on a night job to supplement husband Glen's income after choosing to stay at home with their first child, Brittany.

Rusbatch, who now has a second child, Ben, stayed at home for seven months before taking the night call-centre job. "It was good, because all the money we earned was ours - we didn't have to pay for childcare because Glen was at home."

The New Zealand Childcare Survey of 1998 showed mothers adopting a wide variety of such arrangements to get back to work.

Of the working parents with children aged up to 13, 37 per cent had taken on work in the evenings. A further 35 per cent had flexible working hours, 30 per cent did some work at home and 23 per cent worked in the weekends.

Rusbatch says her night job also allowed her to get out of the house and fulfil her craving for adult conversation - a common feeling among at-home mothers.

"After a while I got to the point where I couldn't stay at home. It was nice to get out of the house and have a break. I couldn't have spent seven years at home with both of them."

She made the most of her time at home by taking both children to swimming lessons and doing things she would not otherwise have been able to.

"I think it's a shame to have to go to work. I'm not judging those who do, but it's a shame. No one is ever going to give them [the children] the same attention. I've seen 2-year-olds in creche-type situations. I've seen them in action and I just don't think they get enough one-on-one attention."

New Zealand Childcare Association chief executive Rose Cole sees many women who are worried about leaving their child with a stranger.

She is frustrated by negative stories originating in the United States about the effect of childcare on an infant's development. Regulations governing childcare in New Zealand are, she says, far more stringent than in the United States.

Cole says it is important to begin looking for a childcare centre early in pregnancy so a relationship can be built up.

Baker says research shows that high-quality childcare is good for a child's development.

"Some people argue that having a mother is better than having money. But money can buy a lot for a child. I would argue that if you're living in a cramped home, with no money for books, and no money for a computer, maybe that's not a better deal." To find a good centre, Cole suggests looking at Education Review Office reports and visiting more than once before choosing.

Her own family situation, where her husband stays home to look after the children, a decision they took because her job had greater opportunities for advancement, goes against trends - just 1 per cent of families are cared for by house-husbands.

Baker says men who take on the role of caregiver can struggle. They have society's traditional perceptions to deal with as well as the stresses of the role.

"Men don't want to do that for the same reasons women don't want to. You don't get a lot of credit for being a house-husband. Take a man who has been out of the workforce for five years. What does he put on his CV?"

If he puts childcarer on his CV, employers often think he cannot get a job, she says.

Such men are now grappling with the same issues as women.

For stay-at-home mum Georgie Bailey, the cash crunch was helped by budgeting advice and the support of her family.

She struggled to come to terms with giving up her longtime sponsorship of a child overseas, but knew she had to.

She and husband Andrew have bought their first home, and she teaches piano on Saturday mornings when he can take care of the children.

She will shortly begin another job at her church, but she does not expect to work full-time even when the children reach school age because she wants to be around when they are sick or need picking up.

Looking back, she is happy with choosing to stay at home, even though the family was close to the limit financially.

Every time something went wrong, they would win a competition or something would fall in their favour.

"We were living on our faith. The budget didn't add up, but we just kept praying."

Kirsty, 30, a solo mother who did not want her full name published, also says support from her family got her through the difficulty of bringing up a child alone.

Her partner left her while she was pregnant, and she tried to save as much money as she could in preparation for the birth.

She was able to stay at home for the first five months, but then had to return to her job in a bank.

Since her 6-year-old started school, her family has again helped with after-school care. "My family have always rallied around and shared looking after my son. My job isn't low paid, but it isn't high either. I doubt I'd be able to do it if I'd had to pay for childcare."

When children reach school age, there is a whole new set of stresses. Mothers need to arrange for their children to be picked up or looked after, and can struggle to find the right type of care.

Knox found a school for her two children that offers good after-school care and fits in with her needs.

Rusbatch has taken on fulltime midwifery studies and still juggles her night job with picking up the children from school. Some days she allows them to spend time at a friend's home before she can get to them.

Like most women, the ones the Herald talked to are still juggling their family lives to find the best mix. There is no easy answer. Women who choose to stay at home with their children are often found to be under as much stress as women who work.

Re-entering the workforce can bring its own set of new problems. Studies show it can be difficult to break into a job, but once a woman has re-entered the workforce she is seen as stable and steady.

Equal Employment Opportunities Trust executive director Trudie McNaughton says it is important that there are good role models for working women who are new to motherhood; that work is family friendly and that women know it is okay to take time off to care for children.

Looking back, Knox remembers the struggle she had getting used to leaving work to care for her sick son. Her own work ethic told her that she should be at work unless she was too sick to be there.

When Jean-Luc was 1, she became pregnant again with a second son, Andre, and was made redundant from the Fire Service. Her payout freed the family's finances enough to allow her to choose - and this time she elected to stay at home.

"I thought it was great, just me and the boys. For the first month it was good, but then it got a bit lonesome. All that baby talk. You do crave adult conversation. I would ring people up all the time, and I'm sure they got bored talking to me."

When her first son reached school age, she had difficulty arranging his schedule around her work hours. She would have to wait outside the school gates for a teacher to turn up in the morning and then rely on her boss' good will.

She says she was lucky the boss was a family man, but she was careful not to take advantage of his generosity.

With her sons now 8 and 6, Knox says she would love to be at home with them when they get a bit older.

"That's when they start to wander a bit. If I had my time over, I would plan it so that I could be home for the first five years and then home when they got older."

For many of Jean-Luc's early milestones, she had to rely on her sister to keep her informed. It still hurts that financial pressure took away the choice to stay home and care for her precious firstborn.

"My sister would tell stories about what Jean-Luc had been up to, and I thought, 'I want to tell those stories'."

FACT FILE

* 53,956 babies were born in the year to June.

* 27,330 (or 50.65 per cent) were boys.

* One third of New Zealand's households include children.

* Those households have an average of 1.9 children.

* There are more babies born to mothers who are 30 than any other age.

* 46 per cent of women having babies are in their 30s.

* The median age for a woman giving birth is 29.9 years. That compares with 28 in 1992 and 24.9 in the 1970s.

* The average age of a first-time mother last year was 30.2. That compares with 23.9 in 1962.

* In the year 2000, 56.8 per cent of babies had parents who were married.

* More than 4000 grandparents had taken on the role of parent to their grandchildren last year.

* Census figures show that in March last year 10 per cent of women (147,855 people) were sole parents.

* 16 per cent of children live in households with an annual income of $20,000 or less.

* 26 per cent live in households with an annual income of more than $70,000.

* The number of women working in part-time jobs has increased 55 per cent in the past decade, to reach 287,934. There are 516,378 women in full-time jobs.

* Almost half of women working part-time reported that they had looked after a child in their household in the four weeks before census night last year.

Read the rest of this series:
nzherald.co.nz/nzwomen