How The Primary/Secondary Parent Model Can Damage Kids
Can we please stop holding this up as the ideal because it’s far from it
A child having only one of their parents as their primary carer is still held up as optimal parenting in many circles. Extra points if the primary carer stays home and resists the temptation to fob their child off to strangers while they selfishly pursue a career.
And yes, the thing that binds this package together is that the primary carer is the mother, who is in most cases the person who gave birth.
I was a small child in the 1970s when relationships and parenting were starkly divided along gender lines. My parents were no exception.
Yet I always felt an unspoken unease that that my Dad, the parent who actually seemed to like hanging out with us kids spent only a fraction of time with us. But then there was no point questioning it because it was just the way it was. Dads had to go to work everyday to earn money.
Instead, we got my mother all day. But for sprawling yards and pedestrian and bicycle friendly neighborhoods, we would have spent our downtime stuck in the house with her and her bleach and furniture polish.
Life with my mother was like living in a giant toxic cocktail of cleaning products. The cleanliness of one’s house was the key indicator of a good wife and mother. A hapless townswoman assessed by my mother as falling short of her KPIs with a flick of her pinky across a dusty windowsill had no hope of recovering her good name.
My brothers and I were a household management issue; a hazard to be wrangled along with stubborn stains, a malfunctioning oven or the domestic crisis that was Bill-next-door’s burn off-day coinciding with her washing day.
As soon as we were old enough to roam the neigborhood until dusk, we kept out of her way. Fortunately it suited her too. She had things to be getting on with. I will never understand her blind faith in the capacity of everyone else to keep us safe. But I think it was more that she never really stopped to consider what might happen.
The only ‘fun’ thing I remember her doing was making colored playdough. But I’m sure it was much less about seeing the joy on our little faces as we made garlic-press spaghetti as getting us out of her hair while she went about her Important Household Business.
Although she was doing it for us, she wasn’t with us. It’s not like she ever pulled up to the laminex table and got blue dough under her fingernails to make salty, slimy cookies. And god forbid we ever do it anywhere other than the kitchen and risk sullying the shagpile.
But I remember doing heaps of stuff with Dad. When he was at home, we had his attention and not just to make sure we didn’t draw on the walls or steal the cooking chocolate.
Despite spending a fraction of the time with Dad, most of my childhood memories of doing fun stuff are with him. He read us stories, sang funny songs and took us to the rubbish tip on the weekend. If we went on holidays, it was him that took us to the beach.
And sometimes, like Bill-next-door, he would burn off rubbish and would let us poke around the smouldering ashes with a stick. Good times.
It wasn’t a case of him being the ‘fun’ parent in the way that kids in separated families have a ‘Disney Dad’ and a Mum who does the actual parenting.
He and my mother had a fundamentally different idea of what parenting was. He was genuinely interested in us as little human beings while she did everything to deny our humanness. He nurtured our individuality and encouraged our curiosity and wonder while she would rather smother it like a rubber tyre at the end of burn-off day.
It was obvious that my Dad cared about us whereas my mother cared more about what other people thought of us, and by extension, her. He was quick to empathy where my mother was quick to judgement — a reflection of how she related to people generally.
I feel somewhat ripped off that the primary carer assigned to me was the parent least equipped to nurture little souls in preparation for life. Although my Dad, as secondary carer made a more positive contribution to my childhood, it simply wasn’t enough to counteract the negative impact of my mother’s parenting.
Far from optimising the wellbeing of children, the traditional primary/secondary carer structure provides an environment for harmful parenting to flourish unchecked. In my case, limiting the care of children to one person was simply not safe.
To some extent, it’s not surprising that women who were forced by society to give up any aspirations of a career and independent identity upon marrying in their early 20s would leak some resentment into their home.
Some women, like my mother, systematically inflicted their unacknowledged frustrations on to their children. As the only daughter, representing possibilities she never had, I bore the brunt — physically and emotionally.
And these mothers could get away with it because they had so much time alone with their children behind closed doors. As long as they were an outwardly respectable middle-class woman who conformed to the behavioural norms of the day, no-one asked any questions.
It’s a system that distorted parenting into an exercise in churning out a product that was presentable to the outside world and reflected well upon their parents. The internal experience of children and the long-term costs to their emotional wellbeing was irrelevant, if acknowledged at all.
I was a good girl because I was too damn terrified to put a foot wrong.
My childhood was immersed in an atmosphere of secrecy. I didn’t understand that what was happening to me was abuse. I think I had some inkling that my mother treated me unfairly compared to my brothers, but it was swamped by the internalised message that I was bad and unworthy.
Even if it had occurred to me to seek outside help, it was far from assured. Riding against me were prevailing ideas that children were seen and not heard and that what happened in a family’s home was no-one else’s business.
Some other mothers may have seen beyond my mother’s performance and picked up that something was a bit off. It might have generated a waft of gossip in hushed tones but it was unlikely to trigger any responsibility to actively protect me.
In an era when corporal punishment was still widely practiced and endorsed in homes and schools, I suspect the inclination of most other parents was to protect their own turf more than shining a light on someone else’s.
In any event, much of what would be considered physical abuse today was passed off as ‘discipline’ and emotional abuse as a concept was unheard of.
While there were no adults I could speak to openly, there were some who provided me with reassurance just by virtue of their quiet presence. My grandmother mightn’t have known what was happening but seemed to sense what I needed. “You’ll always be Gran’s girl, you know”, she would say in response to a question I didn’t even have to ask. She gave me unconditional love and safety. I knew I could always go to her.
I’m sure on some level my Dad knew but then my mother had ample time at her disposal to do whatever she wanted without a reliable witness. She was also very manipulative and could turn any situation around to place her in a favourable light. I knew that saying anything would be futile and only get me in more trouble.
I also think my father saw himself as the peacemaker responsible for holding everything together to maintain an illusion of household harmony. He saw any kind of conflict as inherently bad but as long as it remained unacknowledged, it wasn’t real.
A parent should be a source of physical and emotional safety and if the parent a child is spending most of their time with can’t provide it, that’s a problem, particularly if the child’s other options are limited.
The idea of a primary parent is that they become a child’s primary attachment figure; the person who provides a safe harbour to return to. My mother was not the safe harbour but the sea in a raging storm. Mostly, I had to look outside the home for safety.
It’s assumed that attachment develops by virtue of spending consistent time with a parent. But time did not bond my mother and I, just deepened the wounds of early childhood. Those wounds have continued to affect me profoundly throughout my adult life.
Having one primary carer forces children to put all their attachment eggs in the one basket. It’s simply not fair that adults are able to gamble their children’s wellbeing on their behalf in this way.
If my parents had shared the care of me more equally, my mother would have had less opportunity to damage me and my father more opportunity to counter any damage. When you co-parent you’re accountable to the other parent and you can’t get away with hiding things.
I am a parent of a fourteen-year-old girl and I simply cannot fathom this model of parenting for her. Fortunately for her, she has two mothers who didn’t automatically default to gendered parenting roles. She’s had both of us in her life equally, for better or worse.
Yet as a society, we are still deeply entrenched in a primary/secondary carer model. It denies parents the full range of being human and denies children the benefit of what their parents have to offer.
Just as a partner or friend can’t be all things to you, a parent can’t be all things to a child. Single parents recognise this by surrounding their children with other adults who have something to offer their child.
We still conflate birthgiver with primary carer and parenting with household management. But there is simply no basis to assume that skill sets involved in giving birth or keeping a bathroom spotless equip someone to raise well-adjusted children.
It’s about time we dispensed with rigid and unquestioned gender expectations about what parent should be doing what. It’s not just up to parents but up to the institutions — governments, workplaces, schools and businesses that shape our lives and keep those expectations alive.
