The Care Dilemma by David Goodhart review – a flawed study of family life

It was mostly in the small hours that I first read David Goodhart’s new book on caring. By coincidence, it arrived as I was trying to look after my dying father at one end of the country and my own family at the other, while simultaneously attempting to work. Well, that’s life: there are millions of us in the same boat, which is why a deeper exploration of care feels so very overdue. But perhaps it hasn’t been Goodhart’s life, exactly. When it came to his own four children and elderly parents, he confesses, like many men of his generation he “played a subordinate role” to his now ex-wife and his sisters respectively. As a man tackling this topic now, he writes, he’s braced for some flak. Well, yes; and perhaps particularly as the kind of man who writes that while the early days of lockdown might have been tough on women, “the story in the UK was also one of people finding domestic life unexpectedly rewarding”, which may not be exactly how parents of stir-crazed toddlers remember it. But anyway, back to the book.

This is the third in a trilogy that began in 2017 with the thought-provoking The Road to Somewhere, which immortalised the two warring tribes of Brexit as Everywheres (liberal, cosmopolitan, faintly haughty urban elites) v Somewheres (socially conservative, anchored in provincial towns, annoyed at being condescended to). This time his focus is family life and fertility, a hot topic for British Tories obsessed with the idea that millennials aren’t having enough babies, but also for Trump-era Republicans and the European far right.

Goodhart’s case is the Somewhere-ish one that feminism may have been great for liberating women and boosting economic growth, but that it was less positive for children supposedly damaged by divorce, mothers who’d rather have been at home, and countries whose populations are now shrinking thanks to millennials’ apparent reluctance to settle down and breed. Though there’s an inevitable section titled “What about men?”, he insists the real modern battleground isn’t feminists v disgruntled men who want them back in the kitchen. Instead, it’s “care egalitarians” (who see men’s and women’s roles as interchangeable, and think putting young babies in nursery is self-evidently good) v “care balancers”, who embrace equality but worry about the consequences of what he calls “an unstable family life”. Neither of these archetypes seems wholly convincing in real life, perhaps because parenting is a muddy business that doesn’t lend itself to such starkly drawn binaries as Brexit. But from here, things take a significantly wilder turn.

Goodhart suggests the current teenage mental health crisis may be related to rising divorce rates, while conceding that the timings don’t really fit (given the big shift in divorce rates started in the 1980s). Well, maybe it has something to do with daycare used by working parents, then? Leaping on the US psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s thesis that overprotective parenting has made children too anxious, he suggests that perhaps this kind of coddling starts in nursery rather than at home, if busy staff conscious of being responsible for other people’s precious children become too health and safety conscious. (The sole evidence offered here is one article by a journalist, arguing that she let her toddler take more physical risks than the nursery did.) Is it too far-fetched, he muses at one point, to think a rise in the number of people on long-term sickness benefit is somehow connected to falling numbers of full-time parents? Given he presents no hard evidence actually linking the two, then, yes, it absolutely is a leap too far.

Goodhart returns to firmer ground in the final chapters, arguing that caring should be more highly valued regardless of who does it and offering plenty of practical suggestions, from flexible working practices or free respite care for family carers to more generous paternity leave, and higher wages for social care workers – though, for him, the latter seems partly to be about reducing reliance on cheap immigrant labour.

He’s right, too, that there is an identifiable group of parents who long to spend more time with their children, feel wretched about not doing so, but don’t have the luxury of that choice (though they include fathers as well as mothers). Mainstream political parties tend to offer this often low-earning group cheaper childcare, so that they can work even longer hours, and Goodhart has a point that their voices aren’t much heard: it would be genuinely interesting to hear more from them about what they really want from politicians. But there are no such in-depth interviews here. Instead, the author dusts off two ideas – giving the money spent on subsidising nursery places directly to parents to use as they wish, and a tax break for single breadwinner couples that wouldn’t come close to making up for a stay-at-home parent’s missing salary – that were mainstays of Conservative leadership contests more than two decades ago, in what was socially and economically a very different world.

In fairness to Goodhart, care is a fiendishly difficult policy nut to crack, and nobody has all the answers. But what this book lacks, ironically given its subject, is intimacy; that deep, gut understanding of what it’s really like in 2024 to look after someone who needs you. Without it, this debate risks falling into what Goodhart so astutely identified as the Anywhere political trap, of accidentally talking over the very people it’s supposedly about.

• The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality by David Goodhart is published by Forum (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply