The Care Dilemma — do society’s problems lie in the devaluing of family life?

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“Is raising a child a job for society or for mothers?” asks David Goodhart in this provocative book. “The Four Horsemen of liberal modernity” he writes, are the UK’s social care crisis, the decline in family stability, mental health problems among the young, and falling birth rates. All have been exacerbated, he claims, by the devaluation of the domestic realm.

Initially I feared that The Care Dilemma was going to be a plea to go back to the 1950s, concealed under a thin veneer of cod feminism. It is in part a lament for the days when children were looked after at home, more people were married, and mothers had time to volunteer. But Goodhart (who had four children with the high-achieving Lucy Kellaway, former FT columnist) argues that society has free-ridden on women for too long, taking for granted their caring attributes. He rages at the injustice of women still earning less than men in low-skilled jobs. He wants to cancel nursing debt, give care work more status, extend paternity and maternity leave and provide incentives for grandparents to live close by.

Goodhart is best known for his post-Brexit categorisation of Britain into two tribes. His book The Road to Somewhere (2017) contrasted the “Anywheres”, mobile and educated, with the “Somewheres”, more rooted and socially conservative. The Care Dilemma’s plea to value the domestic realm builds on this concern that society has disenfranchised the “Somewheres” and devalued the practical abilities and emotional intelligence which he extolled in Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century (2020). That book argued that our meritocracy leans too heavily on IQ rather than emotional intelligence.

Goodhart says that the UK has some of the most stringent carer-to-infant ratios in formal care settings in the rich world

The Care Dilemma tries to repeat the trick by setting “care egalitarians” against “care balancers”. Egalitarians, Goodhart claims, believe that men and women are “essentially identical”, and that family structure is irrelevant to life chances. Balancers “embrace equality but worry more about the consequences of unstable family life . . . and want to reform rather than abolish the gender division of labour”. Most voters, he suggests, are balancers: but their voices are not being heard by politicians.

The caricature pinpointed something which does bother me — our tendency to talk about mothers almost exclusively as factors of production. I agree that it seems perverse to count stay-at-home parents in the “economically inactive” numbers which ministers are currently worrying about.

I’m not sure, though, how many people really see men and women as completely interchangeable. “Young women should certainly continue to be encouraged into STEM jobs,”, he writes. “However, that does not necessarily mean that a 50:50 balance is either possible or even desirable”. No — but most people aren’t pushing for 50:50 — they’re just pushing for girls to have the option. And few women would say their men are acting as “interchangeable” when it comes to household chores.

But one question the book poses is whether sex equality is now sufficiently entrenched to let “balancers” be heard, and to get men to step up to play a fuller part. Goodhart hopes so, especially if families can get the much greater level of financial support that he advocates.

The book contains detailed analyses of the failures of both childcare and social care. On childcare, Goodhart says that the UK has some of the most stringent carer-to-infant ratios in formal care settings in the rich world. The UK ratio for children under two is 1:3; in France it is 1:5. He makes a strong case for government to give parents the money, rather than subsidising formal settings.

Social care, he thinks, has the potential to be more of a preventive service with high status. He rightly rails against the “persistence of so many demarcation lines between professional and non-professional staff” which prioritises formal qualifications over practical skills.

There are some amusing anecdotes. He describes how his father Philip Goodhart beat Margaret Thatcher to a parliamentary seat in Beckenham, after a mainly female selection panel grilled her — but not him — on how to combine the MP role with children.

The tone can be supercilious. The book is uninhibited in its assertions about what constitute “female attributes” — more anxious, careful and “agreeable” than men — and what women miss out on if they don’t have children. I accept Goodhart’s point that the conversation about motherhood has been too dominated by professional women (like me). But when he disapprovingly quoted Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, a charity that helps mothers, for saying that “maternity leave can be desperately, achingly lonely”, I found myself thinking but it’s true — and Brearley helped a lot of women by saying so.

Ultimately, the message of this book is that caring can provide more meaning for many of us than work will ever do. That is all the more worth saying because it is unfashionable.

The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality by David Goodhart Forum £25, 256 pages

Camilla Cavendish is a research fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, Harvard University, and author of ‘Extra Time: Ten Lessons for Living Longer Better’

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