To Virpi
Helsingin Sanomat had a most provoking column a couple of days ago. I know Virpi Salmi, the author of the column, isn't alone with her thoughts, and wanted to write a response. I realize a true response needs to be longer than what I can write on the discussion page, so here goes. TO those of you who can read Finnish, here is Virpi's article.
Women have indeed a fairly equal situation to men here in Finland, but there is a difficulty. Virpi points out that when the government pays money for mothers to stay at home with their children until they are three years old, that causes many highly educated women to stay out of work during this time. For the advantage of the society women should go to work, says Virpi, not stay at home - unemployed as it is.
I think Virpi's writing points out another serious flaw in our (Finnish) society. (I'm referring to myself as a Finn in Finland in this blog despite not living there anymore.) We have, as most countries don't, a unique situation: a mother can choose to go to work or to stay at home with her child. In the US the situation is often one of financial realities: a mother staying at home has no income, so if the father doesn't make enough money for the family to survive the mother has to go to work too. However, in the US daycare is not free and can in fact be extremely expensive, so if there are no grandparents to help out it might be cheaper for the mother to stay at home after all, depending on her income level. Maternity leave is fairly short, depending on your place of employment, and you don't get paid during it. In Finland it's different - paid maternity leave can be up to a year and after that one of the parents can decide to stay at home with the child and be paid a small amount of money by the government, as a compensation for not putting the child in the free day care. Few fathers use this, but most mothers do. Those mothers who are career-oriented can go to work and use this same free day care system.
The flaw I see is this: in stead of being grateful about this system that our sisters in the 1970's and 1980's put up, we tend to guilt those who choose differently from us. Mothers who stay at home feel and sometimes even say that the others are not good mothers, without properly maternal feelings and so on. The mothers who work are equally vehement against their lazy counterparts at home. "Working mothers do the same as stay-at-home mothers but much more efficiently" - "Working mothers sacrifice their children for their career" etc. The children's good is used by one side then the other.
Why couldn't it be good for the child if the mother gets to do what she enjoys and is good at? And that isn't always a paying career, just saying.
Virpi think that what's good for the society is at least clear. I say it's not that clear at all - free child care costs a lot of money for the society. Mothers who stay at home don't get paid money and therefore don't pay taxes, but they save money for the society and often also for the household (although not necessarily, depending on what they do with their days...) The cheapest thing for the society would be for those to take care of the children who already can't work for some reason, namely retired grandparents and - sorry, Virpi - unemployed parents, friends or relatives. I have to point out that today's society seems to spit out quite a lot of unemployed people, so seems like there aren't quite enough jobs for even those highly educated women. The second cheapest measure would be for families to pay for childcare (but this would mean many couldn't afford it), or to put children in huge groups and have one adult preside over them, but this all agrees is cruel. Day cares need one adult for each five babies (didn't check this, might be less babies), otherwise we consider it a bad day care.
Is the education going to waste? In day cares in Finland most caretakers need a university degree - Masters. We seem to think raising children requires education. So maybe the problem is that the mothers have education in wrong fields? Well, probably neither Virpi nor anyone else feels the country should be filled with wanna-be mothers with only early childhood education degrees. In fact, I firmly believe that adequate education in almost any field gives a bonus in raising the next generation.
I say, let the families make their own decisions, hopefully well-informed, educated decisions but their own! Mothers can stay at home - let's be grateful about that - and fathers can too - but neither one of them has to. That's the system that was decided on by the idealistic builders of the well-fare state.
My husband read that article too and his comment was: The availability of a choice is a part of equality.
ReplyDeleteEspecially since the husband also has the choice to stay home instead of the mother. It's still cheaper to pay the 'stay at home mom' costs for the government than pay the unemployment benefits.
Few thoughts on this, although I quite honestly hate the subject. You Tuittu, however, managed to write about it in an intresting way.
ReplyDeleteFor one, day care in Finland is not free. I think everyone pays at least something, but sure enough, compared to U.S. or Australia you might as well call it free. My australian friends were quite stunned to hear that nobody in Finland pays more that 200e per month even if they're millionares.
An interesting aspect is that sometimes in Finland you hear people complain about the lack of choices in this matter, whereas I see that in Finland we have a lot more choices than, say, australians do.
Few years ago there was a heated debate on this subject in FD and then, since so many people kept on insisting that the stay-at-home mums are saving the goverment's money by staying home, Teemu made some calculations and it turnes out that this claim is just not true. If you want those calculations I'm sure he'll be happy to give them.
Also the fact that there are people unemployed does not mean that there's a lack of jobs. In fact there are heaps of jobs lacking people to do them. There are even jobs that don't need a lot of education or special skills that don't get filled. So the reason for unemployment is not the lack of jobs, but something else. But that is completely another issue.
Just one more clarification - the requirement for kindergarten teacher (lastentarhan opettaja) is candidate, not master's degree and for child care taker (lastenhoitaja) less than that.
ReplyDeleteand with under three year olds it's four kids per one adult and for over 3 year olds 7 kids per one adult. Full time kids. So you may end up having more kids per adult at times.
I also think we have a great choice. And when thinking what the prophets have and still are counselling us mothers to do, it makes it a bit easier for some, who might struggle with the choice.
Mirja