It takes a village
children’s sickness, community, and intergenerational care networks
Lucy Billings was four when she caught chickenpox. At bedtime, her throat felt scratchy and her body felt achy. When she woke up, she was ‘covered in spots from head to toe’. On the first two days, she lay in bed, drank orange squash and ate buttery toast. By the third day, she was well enough to feel ‘quite cross’, but not well enough to go to preschool. But this was the day of the week that her mother, Mrs Billings, taught food technology at the local secondary school. Lucy’s ‘best friend next door’ Jane Jones and her mother couldn’t care for Lucy, as Jack Jones, the baby, had not yet had chickenpox. So, Mrs Billings asked around the intergenerational informal care network of Coddling Village and Mrs Simpkins, ‘whose children were now grown up and had all had chickenpox’ came to spend the day with Lucy. After a sulky start, Lucy and Mrs Simpkins read stories and made peg dolls, and, by the end of the day, Mrs Simpkins had become Lucy’s favourite person in the village.
Lucy Billings isn’t real. She’s the lead character in Susan Hill’s Stories From Coddling Village, published in 1990. I read it with my mum, and recently I’ve read the same copy to my three-and-a-half-year-old. It’s not really, I realise now, about Lucy. It’s about her mother and the care networks she forged in a rural village faraway from any extended family. (Why they live there, or what Lucy’s father goes to do in a suit with a briefcase, are never addressed.) In each chapter, a network of local women does things like dig tunnels through snow, cooperatively run the village shop, and decorate the church for Christmas. They are forever minding each-other’s children, adding an endless supply of walk-on characters to Lucy’s nuclear family. Part nostalgia, part fantasy, it makes my son long for a best-friend-next-door, while I long for a Mrs Simpkins.
Mrs Simpkins brought lemon cake and conkers to make doll furniture out of
Who cares for children when they get sick? This was a question I failed to ask myself before becoming a parent and then, in a roundabout way, was sheltered from by the pandemic. My first baby was part of a microgeneration of children that spent the first 18 months or so of his life sheltered from viruses. Then, they hit thick and fast. After the lockdowns, the usual seasonal patterns were out of whack as children, thrown back together in the summer/autumn of 2020 and 2021 caught everything, or so it felt. (I was profoundly relieved when I learned via Emily Oster’s newsletter that it was indeed the case that more children were sick more of the time in those years. I wasn’t totally imagining it.) Life felt like a carousel of viruses, often with old timey names that I’d thought had ceased to exist sometime in the early twentieth century: scarlett fever, slap cheek, hand, foot and mouth, and a incidence of norovirus that I assumed clean water supplies would have eradicated.
We don’t have a Mrs Simpkins, so when one of our children is sick, my partner or I miss a day of work. I don’t care to count the working days we’ve have missed over the last year. My not wanting to look directly at the problem seems to be a broader trend. I can’t find any statistics on the amount of work missed due to caring for small, sick children. As of 2023, all UK employees are entitled to one week of unpaid caring leave per year. It doesn’t look as though what is being taken for - sick kids, elderly parents, unwell partners - will be recorded, or the gender data in terms of who takes the unpaid leave. I suspect it will, most often, be women.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, as women became a larger part of the paid labour force, the caring work that was traditionally done by unwaged women was not adequately redistributed. Much of it was done alongside paid work, the second shift. Another simultaneous shift - organising care - also fell to women. Now we call this mental load. Formal paid childcare comes nowhere close to accounting for the time that young children spend being cared for by an adult that is not their parent. Illness is an interesting way of thinking about the scale of this informal care, in that it excludes children from formal childcare settings.
How can historians write about, or know about, informal care? Where in the archives could I find Mrs Simpkins? Where the state, and so the official archive, rubs up against informal caring arrangements it has been to regulate them. Largely, this has been concerned with cases where money is being exchanged. The Mrs Simpkinses doing regular shifts, and receiving cash for it. In the North of England in the 1970s, detectives and social workers stood on street corners in busy estates at 6 o’clock in the morning - following mothers as they dropped off their children at ‘unregistered childminders’. Legislation criminalised receiving payment for regular childcare without qualification and inspection, in part a response to growing awareness of childhood abuse. A national campaign (fronted by, of all people, Jimmy Saville) of televised learning for childminders sought to professionalise previously informal arrangements.
After thir parents, the person most likely to be caring for a child in weekday working hours is the maternal grandmother. 65% of women aged 31-50 live within 45 minutes’ drive of at least one of their parents, and that 40% of grandparents are providing regular (usually at least once a week) childcare care. (There is a vast literature on why it tends to be the maternal grandmother who does this: in short because the responsibility for organising care tends to lie with the mother, and because working class communities in Britain - in a number of ways - have tended to be matrilineal.) But even in the case of grandparents, the data that we have now is about regular, organised care. It’s not about the informal, emergency care I’m interested in. But my guess would be that for many the answer to who cares for a child with chickenpox is, granny.
In Mother Brain, part memior, part dive into maternal psychology, Chelsea Conaboy argues that - across history and cultures - one of the major preconditions for fertility (at a population level) is social support. The maternal brain is hardwired to seek allies, community - people that can support the mother themselves, or hold the baby. Often, this has been the mother’s own mother. A national trend - mothers being supported by their own mothers - is global and transhistorical. But support doesn’t have to be grandmaternal, or even familial. Demographers have found that the feeling of support that is a precondition for high birth rates can be produced by the state, but it must feel secure and lasting. People have children when they believe that they will have help.
In a withering state, people are most likely to look to their immediate and extended families for social support. This, Melinda Cooper argues, is why the family - both nuclear and intergenerational - is fundamental to neoliberalism. Bound by the strictures of family, women provide the support that the state withdraws. Women’s participation in the paid labour force isn’t changing this dynamic: possibly, it is intensifying it. Eve Worth’s Welfare State Generation charts the lives of the women who came of age after the war, fought hard to build or rebuild their own careers alongside and after childbearing. Now - as grandmothers - have retired into a third shift. They help raise the next generation so that their daughters can have the professional opportunities that they missed.
Some of the government’s half-baked policy proposals for solving the ‘childcare crisis’ have involved harnessing the social reproductive power of women in their 50s and 60s through childminding and nannying. This was pushed especially hard by (surprise surprise) agencies that would have skimmed off their profits. What these agencies were offering ‘older women’ was an ‘opportunity’ to monetise their long experience of caring for their own children by caring for someone else’s. So far it has not proved an attractive enough offer to recruit. Koru Kids (controversial influencer of childcare policy, with shares owned by Sunak’s wife) closed the childminder recruitment and management wing of the business a few months ago.
Koru kids is one of a host of websites and apps which ‘match’ parents with childcare. One of the big selling points of these websites is that they can find last-minute, ad-hoc, one-off childcare, having pre-vetted qualifications. This is a kind-of childcare gig economy, in a sector already characterised by poor pay and high staff turnover. What it speaks to is the difficulty for working parents of finding a Mrs Simpkins. In Stories from Coddling Village, Mrs Simpkins isn’t paid but, as an elder woman in the community, lives alongside younger women like Mrs Jones who she has seen step in to care for other elder neighbours. There is informal reciprocity within the village, and it hinges on the fact that women like Mrs Jones are only working for money one day a week. Otherwise, they are devoting their time to building the kind of shared care networks that will – in a pinch – enable that paid work.
John Lawrence’s Me Me Me, a study of community and individualism in post-war Britain, found that in so called ‘new towns’ and suburbs (where people lived as they tended to move away from extended family in the postwar period) community tended to coalesce around the (largely unwaged) mothers of young children and the retired. People who had care needs, and had time to create the communities that helped to fulfil them. This is borne out by my own (admittedly limited) work in the Mass Observation archives: care needs for young children push people to get to know their neighbours (in the 1960s and 1970s, babysitting circles were a classic example). Fulfilling and sharing care needs, in turn, further built community.
These networks thrive alongside formal, state led care and infrastructure. They form around school gates, library storytimes, and playgrounds. Social scientists and historians have shown, time and again, that if you want social support – ‘care in the community’ – then you have to provide state infrastructure to enable it. But these networks also need people with time to be at the school gates, the playground, the library. Of course this shouldn’t always be mothers. For anyone, full time work alongside full time caring is atomising. Full time without care work is atomising.
I’ve been reading about contemporary pronatalism recently, and the terrifying evangelical right in Britain. One of their solutions for raising the birth rate is – rather than creating infrastructure that has been proven to do so – is to keep extended families closer together. Education has long been blamed for women having fewer children, later. Now, Conservative MPs like Miriam Cates, blame the pull away from families that higher education and labour migration creates for the lack of support that mother’s ‘complain of’ when they have their own children. If only they had stayed closer to home and their own mothers instead of expecting the state to step in.
I’m fascinated by the question of informal, ad hoc care because it feels so fraught for me. I don’t have my mum to help care for my kids, and she brought us up in a different country from hers. But as a child, I had my own ‘Jane Jones’ – a best friend next door. Our parents and siblings together created pattern of shared care that felt chaotic and utopian. Looking back its easy for me to read political meaning onto it: making family through expansive care, rather than enclosing care within the nuclear family. At the time, I doubt anyone was thinking in such lofty terms. It was the necessary, everyday distribution of labour and children, travelling back and forth through a hole in the garden hedge.
a picture of the hole in the hedge here, with one of my babies, as a record of its existence
Family histories, genealogy, inheritance tend to follow formal, biological lines. The extra set of siblings I grew up with won’t appear on any family trees. The absence of extra-familial care in the archives is another way in which the labour of women is erased. Perhaps this is one reason why, even having grown up in a paradise of shared care, I didn’t fully see its importance. Now that I do, I’ll keep looking.