‘A tragic novel in miniature, describing in heartbreaking terms a young child’s attempts to build a relationship in the short time she spends with her mother during the working week’…
…is what the lone Amazon UK review ought to say; instead it begins ‘Simply lovely’. (I checked because I didn’t believe it was real - we’ve reached a point where it’s hard to tell what is satire any more.)
As a public attempt to assuage the conscience of a woman who chose to return to her job as head of state when her baby was six weeks old, it takes some beating. As so often, I find myself returning to my zoo analogy - if every infant primate in London Zoo was removed from its mother for eight or nine hours every working day and placed in a crêche, animal rights activists would surely be up in arms.
A wise and experienced person of my acquaintance suggests that, in part, much of our risk-averse society is the result of numerous working mothers, subconsciously rendered anxious by separation from their dependent young, projecting this concern into decision- and policy-making for the wider population - ‘trying to wrap the world in cotton-wool’, as she puts it - which would certainly fit with the point about lockdown in the video.
Macheath - your wise and experienced person seems to be right, ‘trying to wrap the world in cotton-wool' is just what has been happening in recent decades. Some of it may be a bureaucratic tendency towards mission-creep, with enhanced safety being a driver for that, but the two effects will not be separate.
Numerous working mothers are bound to be anxious about what they are doing and this is bound to affect their work persona.
5 comments:
*jaw drops in disbelief*
‘A tragic novel in miniature, describing in heartbreaking terms a young child’s attempts to build a relationship in the short time she spends with her mother during the working week’…
…is what the lone Amazon UK review ought to say; instead it begins ‘Simply lovely’. (I checked because I didn’t believe it was real - we’ve reached a point where it’s hard to tell what is satire any more.)
As a public attempt to assuage the conscience of a woman who chose to return to her job as head of state when her baby was six weeks old, it takes some beating. As so often, I find myself returning to my zoo analogy - if every infant primate in London Zoo was removed from its mother for eight or nine hours every working day and placed in a crêche, animal rights activists would surely be up in arms.
A wise and experienced person of my acquaintance suggests that, in part, much of our risk-averse society is the result of numerous working mothers, subconsciously rendered anxious by separation from their dependent young, projecting this concern into decision- and policy-making for the wider population - ‘trying to wrap the world in cotton-wool’, as she puts it - which would certainly fit with the point about lockdown in the video.
Macheath - your wise and experienced person seems to be right, ‘trying to wrap the world in cotton-wool' is just what has been happening in recent decades. Some of it may be a bureaucratic tendency towards mission-creep, with enhanced safety being a driver for that, but the two effects will not be separate.
Numerous working mothers are bound to be anxious about what they are doing and this is bound to affect their work persona.
"her job as head of state" Please don't go all American on us. Her job was Head of Government.
I think, and thought at the time, that was the principle reason for the government and elites' reaction to Covid.
Tammly - you may be right, it wasn't rational in spite of the propaganda.
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