KEY POINTS:
A pioneering conference on "the meaning of motherhood" in Auckland yesterday heard calls for "mothers' equity" - treating all mothers equally whether they choose to go back to paid work or stay at home with their children.
The calls may fall on receptive ears in Wellington, as new
Social Development Minister Paula Bennett has called for a national debate on whether mothers are being pushed back to work too soon after having children.
Parents Centres chief executive Viv Gurrey, one of the conference organisers and a National Party list candidate in this month's election, called for extending the present 14 weeks of paid parental leave and other measures to "allow parents to care for their children and not institutionalise them".
"We have a great opportunity with the new Government to get these things looked at and get mothering, and parenting generally, back to the fore," she said.
Australian writer Anne Manne, author of Motherhood: How Should We Care For Our Children? said declining birth rates in all developed countries were driving Governments to give parents more help, such as "homecare allowances" for those who stay home with their children.
The Families Commission, which also helped to organise yesterday's conference, last year proposed extending paid parental leave to a year, plus a month for fathers.
Labour, and possibly National, had been ready to announce policies extending paid leave before the election but pulled back when world finance markets collapsed last month. In the end, neither party promised any change to the present 14 weeks.
Ms Manne said current policies still did not give women genuine choice.
"In the new economy, smuggled in under the guise of overturning all that [laws against working wives], we are actually smuggling in a new social legitimation of a regime which is equally coercive - not necessarily by law, but by the ways we structure the tax system and everything else," she said.
"Our society is a high-consumption society where ever fewer people live in ever-larger houses. We have a housing affordability crisis. We have hugely problematic levels of indebtedness, so that families are trapped into working more hours to keep pace."
She said subsidised childcare and early childhood education were often justified on economic grounds because they were said to give children a better start for their school years, but the needs of the children themselves were ignored.
Children she knew who were lively at home seemed bland and unemotional in childcare.