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SocietyMarch 21, 2018

Mark Richardson says being a parent is ‘not a job’. But why not?

Jess Berentson-Shaw

Contributing writer

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The AM Show host claimed this week that while it is ‘hard work’ being a mum, ‘you can’t call it a job’. But should payment be the yardstick by which we measure work? Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw thinks not.

Parenthood is no walk in the cricket oval. There are many parents who would agree that it is “the hardest job they have ever done”, but is it really a job? I mean playing professional cricket, now that is a job, but is parenting? You get paid for professional cricket after all, but you don’t get paid for parenting, so it doesn’t really count as work surely?

But if we paid for parenting would we then count it as a “work”?

Last week I had a conversation with my 8-year-old daughter about rugby. She was somewhat incensed to discover that not only are there excellent women rugby players in New Zealand who get nary a mention on the back of a Weetbix packet, but also that despite winning the World Cup five times, they had up until this year not been paid to play (and now only a small salary). Meanwhile the men, who had won their World Cup only three times, were paid, ahem, quite a lot. I believe her exact words were “so the women have to work another job as well as do the job of rugby, even though they are better?”

I don’t wish to start a riot about the relative quality of women and men’s sports. I do want to discuss why what counts as “work” is influenced by whether it is paid. And that whether work is paid or not depends very much on social and cultural norms, not on the actual contribution of it to the functioning of society.

We don’t pay for parenting (or do we?)

We don’t pay people to expend all their time, money, energy, youth and good hair to raise a new generation to contribute to society (ie. play cricket and have opinions on the telly). Perhaps it is this lack of pay that causes some to see parenting as “not a real job”. Yet we do in a way pay for parenting. We pay paid parental leave, which when it was introduced as policy in 2001 was specifically intended to “cover the opportunity costs of parenting”. In other words, paid parental leave was designed to recognise that people who had just had babies were temporarily leaving a paid job to do another job for which they were not being paid. So we do sort of pay a salary; not much though, so perhaps people believe it lacks “real value” – i.e. monetary value

There is economic value to parenting, we just choose not to count it

Parenting is a hard, demanding and important job, but there is no (or very little) money changing hands over it, so it is not contributing to the economy as measured by GDP. But we have established there is some money changing hands, so that is a small fly in the ointment.

Another small fly in the “there is no real economic value” argument is that when, someone (i.e. not a parent) is paid to look after a child this does count towards GDP. The exact same work, just carried out by different people, is counted differently in our measure of economic activity. That is kind of inconsistent.

It is not that some people in government don’t get the issue either. Statistics New Zealand undertakes formal measurement of the value of parenting, and all unpaid work.

In 2009, Stats NZ carried out the Time Use survey. It reported that unpaid work contributed at least $40 billion a year to the economy. Women do most of the unpaid work and do it during their working years. Men still do unpaid work, but they do less of it and usually after they have retired. Most of the unpaid work women are doing is caring for other people.

A report by PwC in Australia last year looked at the monetary value of all that country’s unpaid childcare and put it at $345 billion a year. As the authors ask, “Why is it that a mother caring for her children produces no measured economic value, but the same mother hiring others to look after her children does?”.

It is not just mothers we are talking about here; it is people of all genders whose caring work isn’t formally recognised in economic activity.

So why don’t we count parenting?

Economists have been pointing out the glaring unbalance for some time. Prue Hyman, who has been writing on this subject for over 25 years, told Stuff earlier this month that “[unpaid work] contributes to the upbringing and wellbeing of the next generation of economically active people and it provides services, care and support for those who would otherwise be more dependent on public resources for their welfare.” And Professor Marilyn Waring, author of the book If Women Counted, was recently interviewed on Q&A where she told Corin Dann that “we have to realise [unpaid work] is the single largest sector in any nation’s economy. And the whole of the market economy only is able to function on top of that.”

It is not just the women raising the issue. Economist Richard Dennis has long argued that the unbalance in the economy created by ignoring the work of women is unjust and unacceptable. Dennis argues, in this great talk, that women are being sold a lie about what is holding them back financially: it has nothing to do with their choices and everything to do with what we choose to value in society.

At the risk of starting a second riot, parenting is not valued because we don’t value work traditionally done by women in the same way we value that traditionally done by men – even when women produce the exact same value. Take recent research by Dr Isabelle Sin, who found women in New Zealand producing the same value for a company were still paid 16% less than men. Nice.

Count it as an economic activity to ensure we focus on its importance

Caring for people is vital work; without it society would not function, literally. Think of all the people you work with – carrying out important, interesting work – who rely on caring work to do their job. All of us need caring for at some point in our lives, and many of us will do that caring.

As a society that values taking care of people, we need caring work to be not just done, but done well. One way of helping this happen is to count it economically. Counting the economic value of an activity opens it up to political attention, to policy and investment decisions. It makes people in power consider how to improve it.

The trick of course is how to get it counted. GDP is a pretty poor measure of what has real value in society because – just putting this out there – maybe money is not actually a good measure of the things that matter most. So right now Treasury is looking at new ways of measuring economic activity. That’s good news, but we should be alert to the risk that caring work will get left out of that framework if it is not seen as worthwhile by those developing it. Perhaps the real issue is who gets to say what matters in our society. Hopefully the people at Treasury are not former cricketers.

This section is made possible by Simplicity, New Zealand’s fastest growing KiwiSaver scheme. As a nonprofit, Simplicity only charges members what it costs to invest their money. It already has more than 12,500 plus members who, together, are saving more than $3.8 million annually in fees. This year, New Zealanders will pay more than $525 million in KiwiSaver fees. Why pay more than you need to? It takes two minutes to switch. Grab your IRD # and driver’s licence. It really is that simple.

SocietyMarch 20, 2018

Whose fault is it when the young and vulnerable offend?

John Walker

Guest writer

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Rather than waste our energies finger pointing, taking collective responsibility for tackling the complex underlying causes of youth offending has a better chance of success, argues Principal Youth Court Judge John Walker

When we hear about an aggravated robbery of a dairy or service station by a young person, and we read about the long-term pain, injury and emotional trauma suffered by those who are robbed, we are right to be deeply concerned.

There is often a call for courts to treat these young offenders like adults: “Adult crime, adult time.”

The sad truth is that they are still children.

When they are 10 or 11, we see them as “vulnerable” children in need of care and protection. Then their offending behaviour, emerging out of the very same vulnerability, changes the game. Suddenly, it is all their fault.

But whose fault is it when children and young people offend? And how can we apportion blame when we are struggling to understand the complex weave of underlying issues that set children on a collision course with the law? After all, children do not grow up in a vacuum. They are raised in families; families that make up communities which are supposed to be the backbone of our society.

The long-term protection of communities from offending behaviour and the reclaiming of young lives requires recognition of what lies beneath the behaviour, and addressing that effectively. Communities are integral to that.

In the Youth Court, we are often playing “catch up”, trying to turn young lives around by dealing with issues which have been there, and identifiable, for many years, maybe even from birth.

The court strives to understand what is driving the behaviour. It seeks to deal with these underlying causes using multi-disciplinary teams and by applying the court’s authority to engender motivation to engage in interventions.

The complexity of the lives we are working with makes it an immense challenge. It seems the more we learn about young offenders the harder it gets. One thing is certain: unless the underlying causes of offending are tackled effectively, offending will continue. And the longer we wait to intervene the tougher it will become.

There is little doubt that the nature of offending that reaches the Youth Court is becoming more serious and complex. We are seeing more violent offending, particularly in high-density, high-deprivation areas, and increasingly by girls. So worrying is the emerging trend of violent offending among girls and young women that last year my office started a multi-agency initiative to try and develop effective responses.

Most of those who appear in the Youth Court have a background of Care and Protection proceedings in the Family Court. They have a history of being considered seriously at risk. Neuro disability disorders such as Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, intellectual disability and dyslexia are significantly higher in those who come to court than in the general population. There is increasing mental illness – so much so that issues of fitness to stand trial are no longer rare.

Judge John Walker at the launch of Whangārei’s Rangatahi Court at Terenga Paraoa marae in February

Being in school is a major protective factor against offending yet almost half the young people who offend are not attending school. There is a very clear co-relation between exposure to family violence and going on to commit serious violent offences. About 80% of children and young people who offend are estimated to have experienced family violence, either directly or indirectly.

Latest research suggests that girls especially are more likely to become violent offenders and to mix with violent men if they have been exposed to family and sexual violence while growing up.

The effects of growing up in a climate of violence are severe: physically, emotionally, and developmentally, including on the unborn. I agree with the view that if you bring a child up in a war zone you end up with a warrior.

Bring any one of these complications into a young life – let alone more than one of them – and we begin to understand why a young person has offended.

Often I finish reading a psychological report detailing the tumultuous background of a young offender and the question I ask is: “So why is anyone surprised about what has happened?” A 14-year-old boy with the same underlying issues that as a 10-year-old made him vulnerable is now considered criminal; a dangerous teen on his way to becoming a dangerous adult.

The behaviours and coping mechanisms, the delayed development and disengagement from school and community are well entrenched. Deprived of a safe and nourishing environment to grow up in, teens like him are on a path to prison.

It is too easy, and simplistic, for communities to view youth offending as evidence of teenagers “gone bad”, of an emerging generation who are hopeless, dangerous and need to be put behind bars. In my view, taking collective responsibility for the plight of those who fall into paths of crime – including for the effects of their behaviour – is a crucial start for fashioning effective responses and lasting solutions.

Recognising that behaviour does not come from nowhere requires us to ask what we can do – community by community – to address the causes of offending and to provide environments in which our young people can thrive, enabling us to reclaim young lives for the benefit of all.

The Youth Justice system cannot operate successfully in isolation. It needs community involvement to help address the underlying causes of youth offending. Communities have enormous untapped resource to help find solutions. Often they just need to be engaged, given information about what we are seeing, and shown a pathway to join with those agencies and families who need their help.

The Youth Court and its judges have a powerful role in this. We know that engagement between courts and the communities they serve can enable local resources to come into the court to help, in areas such as literacy, mentoring and employment training and opportunities.

Rather than waste our energies finger pointing, constructive approaches that involve communities taking collective responsibility for their young people and learning about and then addressing the underlying causes of behaviour are more likely to turn lives around.

This section is made possible by Simplicity, New Zealand’s fastest growing KiwiSaver scheme. As a nonprofit, Simplicity only charges members what it costs to invest their money. It already has more than 12,500 plus members who, together, are saving more than $3.8 million annually in fees. This year, New Zealanders will pay more than $525 million in KiwiSaver fees. Why pay more than you need to? It takes two minutes to switch. Grab your IRD # and driver’s licence. It really is that simple.