This week’s dispatch from motherhood comes to you from a children’s amusement centre in Naas. With Dublin Bay in the rear-view, I set off to meet my best friend (a blow-in to the short grass county) for the 90-minute window she has in between infant and non-infant primary school pickups. I stayed on in the Jungle Den for a further two hours, lured by the combination of cheap child diversion, roomy workspace, free wifi and inexpensive coffee. As Dua Lipa’s mezzo-soprano tones pulsed through my de facto office and I tried to write a lecture on Descartes’ Sixth Meditation, I think I may have finally experienced the real distinction of mind and body. Exchanging chaotic grimaces with a woman dividing her attention between her over-excited toddler and her tablet at a nearby table, I wondered about our changing childcare landscape.
My path to remote working from a neighbouring county’s soft play centre involved my daughter starting in junior infants/naíonáin bheaga at the end of August. As is common, her class finished at 11.30am for the first few days (in our case, for the first fortnight). I admire the gentleness of this approach, but given how few children now start school with zero experience of educational settings outside of the home thanks to the ECCE programme, it feels a bit unnecessary.
Five minutes in advance of the on-site afterschool’s booking window opening, I found myself in front of the laptop eagerly clicking “refresh”, as if Oasis had just announced another set of dates. In this case the reward for my commitment was not the opportunity to relive the 1990s at exorbitant prices, but a chance for my husband and I to continue doing our jobs – at a cost that many would also consider unreasonable.
Then, 10 days before the scheduled first day, the afterschool emailed to say that, instead of starting on the first day of term as promised, it would actually start on the first day of week four. Meeting other parents on those first days, what struck me most was the paucity of outrage. Everyone is already so inured to the scramble for childcare, and filling the gaps with grandparents, ad hoc co-ops and relatively inexpensive Kildare soft plays.
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So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to fit a day’s work into the two and a half hours I have between cycles to and from the school, and whatever other peace I can snatch from my days of entertaining my beloved four year old. (This, while having paid in advance for the afterschool and also her toddler brother’s full day in creche.) I laughed when people told me that, despite the eye-watering cost, I would miss the structure of full-time creche, but here we are.
Our economy has evolved into one in which it is the norm for most parents to work, and yet the infrastructure around schools and childcare has changed minimally. We see critical commentary from, on the one hand, parents, saying schools need to open longer and have fewer holidays. In the other direction, teachers and other school staff remind us that teaching is not actually the same as childcare, and that the idea that teachers are at home relaxing every day they are not at the helm of a classrooms is a gross misconception. Teachers – and other school staff like secretaries and caretakers that have recently been striking for proper public service recognition – arguably have a broader mandate than ever, and the suggestion that they should be rowing in to mind our kids in the afternoon is obviously silly. Yet, families are clearly struggling with filling the gaps between the work and school calendars.
The structures around care do not reflect our changing realities in more ways than mere calendar gaps. As is often noted with pearl-clutching anxiety, we’re having fewer kids and we’re having them later. The average age of all mothers at maternity was 33.3 in 2024. That number has been increasing for some time. And where there are older mothers, there are older grandparents.
“The sandwich generation” is a term used to describe a new cohort of parents who face care obligations in two generational directions – looking after young children but also, increasingly, many beginning to attend to their own parents’ welfare. A PhD candidate in Trinity College, Bhavya Shrivastana, recently wrote : “As Ireland’s population grows older and childbirth happens later in life, more families are supporting three generations at once. While this reflects progress, it also places growing pressure on those in the middle, especially as the state supports struggle to keep pace with today’s demographic realities and economic demands.”
[ Is four too young to let my daughter go for a walk on her own?Opens in new window ]
Given the ageing demographics of mothers, and with them, grandparents, how long is this really sustainable? There may also be pragmatic issues around the suitability of many people in their late 70s for this demanding kind of care work.
If the Government plan for school-age care is going to continue to echo former taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s infamous mortgage advice – “ask your parents” – they need to recognise that the demographics are making that a less than viable plan. If trends continue, not only will grandparents not be able to help out with childcare, they may actively need more help themselves.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a postdoctoral researcher working at Trinity Research in Social Sciences in Trinity College Dublin
