Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

Baboushka

Definitions of an 'older mum' can vary wildly, not just from one country to another, but from region to region, family to family. What's old in one person's eyes can be positively youthful in someone else's. Thanks again to all who commented on Tuesday's posting and reminded me of this.

Here's another good example. Apparently even today, in Russia, women tend to have babies before the age of 25, and women older than this are categorised by maternity units as 'elderly', or whatever the Russian is for 'over the hill'.  Dread to think what they'd make of new mums in their 40s. Stalin probably rounded them up and sent them to the Siberian salt mines in disgrace for pressing their withered ovaries into service one last time. Personally I blame all those matrioshka dolls they have. Such temptation to see if there's another little one waiting to emerge.

I discovered about Russian ideas on maternal age in Oliver James' book Affluenza, in which he explores why so many more people fixate on what they haven't got and seek to be someone they're not.

Not obviously a book where I expected to come across definitions of an 'older' mum. But maternal age is relevant here, insists James. He says he mentions childbearing age in Russia, because Russian women 'do not yet define their worth through paid work'. Many of them do work, but their primary focus remains on being mothers. Hence fewer of the tensions between work and family experienced by so many of their counterparts in Western Europe.

James lays the blame for some of our social ills at the door of poor childcare. His biggest bugbear is putting young children into nurseries before they're ready and even argues that our culture's restless dissatisfaction and obsession with 'having' rather than 'being'  is a byproduct of inadequate early child care that makes us insecure and needy.

He objects to mums leaving young children in nurseries or with childminders, arguing this causes long-term behavioural problems for the children in question, who find it difficult to form relationships and tend to base their sense of worth on external factors (exam grades, size and location of house, trendy gadgets). The problem with 'affluenza' is its many sufferers are never satisfied, no matter how much they achieve or own,  leaving them with an unquenchable sense of emptiness. Since Beanie, aged 17 months, goes to nursery twice a week, you can imagine how I felt when I read that.

Here is James on the evils of day care for young children: "The message from research is clear: under three a child is best off with one person, the same one every day and one who is responsive."

However, he's not unsympathetic to mothers: "The great problem [with being a mother] is the lack of status it attracts and our having been brainwashed into believing that only paid work is admirable. Unfortunately it will be rare that anyone other than your partners will give you the credit you deserve. But in its absence, remember this: however much you were raised to be a prize-hunter, intrinsic pleasure is far better for your emotional well-being. It may not seem so very often, but the authenticity, vivacity and playfulness of small children is hugely rewarding, a much greater boon than any number of promotions or pay rises."

So there we go.

Posted 20 September 2007 13:19

Older mother Childcare Nursery Parenting gurus

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