Mr Osborne's announcement that working couples will receive money to pay others for looking after their children (but not for looking after their own), and his justification that 'stay-at-home parents' (in other words those who believe that having a baby should also involve looking after it) make a 'lifestyle choice', was all too disappointingly familiar.
The whole interconnected morass of pay, benefits and tax for families needs taking apart and redesigning from the bottom up. At the moment it appears purposely designed to undermine a healthy, supportive environment for small children. At the bottom end of the income scale, men in low-paid work simply cannot afford to be good fathers - their partners are better off living on state benefits than on joint wages. Are we simply to put such men on the social scrapheap? In the middle reaches, work-work-work, consume-consume-consume, to a constant background drip of denigration of parenthood and family life (see Hannah Betts, passim, on the subject of 'breeders'). And at the top end - the nanny, as it ever was. Looking after small children is regarded as the dumbest possible occupation: not vital work but a 'lifestyle choice' for the idle rich or the feckless poor, or the lowest-paid of jobs, suitable for gormless teenagers without any GCSEs.
Then a few years later, we have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes because no one cooks family meals any more but lives on unhealthy snacks, we have young teenagers holed up in their bedrooms watching porn, or being bullied to the point of suicide because their self-esteem depends on their status on social networks, and it's 'duh? Where did that come from?' Certainly not from middle-class parents not being there to support their children through the confusions of childhood because they were too busy working! Oh no! A good feminist, a good citizen, gets straight back to work and develops her career! Stay-at-home mothers who want tax breaks are whingers! There's a lot of covert bullying and outright denial about these attitudes, which really makes me angry.
If you do take some years out to look after a young family, everyone assumes that you are unenterprising and your brain has died. The reality is the opposite. Being a full-time parent for a few years makes you a better worker as well as a better person. The balance of physical and mental tasks is better for you than sitting at a desk all day (very like what Matthew Crawford advocates in his book 'The Case for Working With Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us', although that is a very male-oriented, motorbiker sort of book); you come away with more ideas and more creativity as well as better time management and negotiation skills. But try getting any employer to recognise that! Particularly as in many jobs they are forced to pay you on an age-related payscale - they might have more incentive to employ come-back mothers (or fathers!) if pay could be related directly to experience.
It's not a question of 'lifestyle choice' for the individual, nor yet a gender issue: it's a question of how we, as a society, are going to raise a future generation that is basically functional. But this idea is clearly beyond Messrs Osborne, Cameron and Clegg.
