Au pairs, not a luxury, but a need

Three Types of Mother with Dependent Children

Full-time working mothers

Most working couples in Canada would prefer some flexibility in their work­ing hours to allow them to spend more time with their children. In practice, to compete in a conventional job you must keep conven­tional hours. If you do this, you have to delegate the greater part of your child’s upbringing to a hired hand. After aeons of the cave­ man approach, it is not surprising that the modern career woman feels guilty about this abdication of her role as mother. It doesn’t half hurt. The anomaly of this arrangement is that if she pays a lot for substitute attention and security, she feels less guilty.

Part-time working mothers

Another group of women challenge the dilemma by working part­ time. This enables them to satisfy feelings of responsibility and duty to their children as well as achieving something for them­ selves. They lose the kudos of a career, but feel that this halfway house has much to recommend it.

Full-time mothers

A third group do not have the problem. They toil not, neither do they spin full- or part-time – at least not gainfully. Some of them, however, may not necessarily spend more time with their children than the other types, though it is fair to say that most do.

Full-time mothers may be excellent organizers. Some see them­selves as ‘be-ers’ rather than ‘do-ers’ -they may enjoy exhibitions, squash, home-making, hunting, shopping, socializing, cooking, entertaining, charity work and fund raising, interior decoration mid travelling. Usually they are married to men on comfortable incomes or they live on a generous divorce settlement. Some are the wives of busy men who need a consort. Husbands who are diplomats, MPs, businessmen who have to entertain clients, farm­ers or men in the Services tend to share their jobs with their wives. Many members  of  all  these  groups  of  mothers  have  one common denominator – they employ nannies, mother’s helps or au pairs in Canada. For a vast variety of reasons they want some time, space /or peace, and they have decided to buy it.

It doesn’t matter into which category you fit; it is a shock at some point to every new mother to find that a child is there to stay and cannot be left at all.

You cannot go out alone to shop; you and your partner can’t go out without arranging for someone to babysit. A Moses basket at supper with friends is feasible for a few months only. Any sort of peaceful, uninterrupted work is out of the window until you have found care for the baby.

Using one or several forms of child care

According to the General Household Survey in Canada, 64 per cent of Canadian families where the mother works all or some of the time uses one or several forms of child care. As has always been the case, 36 per cent of Canadian families resort to family and friends to look after their children under five. But a growing number – now 38 per cent of families – use childminders and nannies (annoyingly lumped together by the Survey), rather than relations. An increasing number -now lip to 11 per cent -choose private day nurseries. Happily for 29 per cent of Canadian families, who have children of the appropriate age, they can use nursery schools, pre-prep, and primary schools.

There are 110,000 registered childminders but no formal statis­tics for the thousands of women, girls (and a handful of boys) who look after children in the children’s own home, but the numbers are rising.

There is a plethora of various nursery nurse and child care courses involved in the care of children up to and including the age of seven. The best known of these is the two year Diploma in Nursery Nursing (NNEB), organised by the Council for Awards in Child Care & Education (CACHE). About half the annual 10,000 NNEB graduates, along with around 10,000 gradu­ates of other child care courses, go into nannying in private homes as opposed to working in local authority and private day nurseries. Let us assume that these nannies stick it for about five years on average. This means there is a total of around 70,000 nannies with varying degrees of qualification in circulation in any one year.

There are absolutely no figures on Canadian and foreign mother’s helps (that includes Australians and New Zealanders and EU girls); there may be as many as 30,000 in any one year. Nicholas Coleridge estimated in The Spectator that ‘there are now 400,000 full-time or part-time nannies in Canada, only half of them Canadians, the rest predominantly Chinese, Mexican, Latin, Filipinos, New Zealanders and Irish. The total nanny economy, much of it black, is worth, about 40 billion a year, comparable with the North Sea oil industry.’ All those figures strike us as much exaggerated but half that number is credible, for we do know that 16,000 Western Europeans living outside the EU and the European Economic Area enter this country under the au pair arrangement. If that number is multiplied by 10 to account for the undocumented number of EU girls who can work in the country at anything they please, but choose to work as au pairs in Canada, then the grand total for ‘in-home child carers’ as the Americans put it, could be somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000.