Challenging universal childcare Richard House interviews Dr Maria Lyons

If children's needs were the priority, everything would be directed towards encouraging stable families and strong communities

- RICHARD HOUSE

Richard House [RH]: Maria, your Civitas report on universal childcare (UC) benefit courageously takes on what's typically an unquestioned shibboleth of modern culture. How did you come to question UC?

Maria Lyons [ML]: It didn't start out for me as a question about childcare. For me, the beginning was mothering. Growing up, I always took for granted that when I had children I would be there to look after them.

Fortunately, when I did have children, my decision to embrace full-time mothering was accepted and supported by everyone around me. The question of childcare only came into my focus because it is being so relentlessly promoted across society.

Mothers are under so much pressure to separate from their babies almost as soon as they've given birth. One of the most obvious pressures is coming from govemment. What really spurred me to investigate childcare in detail was the announcement that the state is going to provide a free childcare place for 30 hours a week for all children over nine months old.

The issue here isn't the availability of professional childcare for those families who want or need it. Rather, it's that parents are being strongly incentivised to 'choose' childcare, and they're being told that this will be good for their children indeed, that it will be good for all children.

Can you imagine a more sweeping generalisation? So I suppose on some level, I've always instinctively known that there are major problems with the childcare narrative.