Mothering is in the news, again. A report out today reveals that the UK has failed to rank among the top 20 places in the world to be a mother. Finland, Sweden and Norway make the top three of Save the Children's mothers' index, the UK ranks at number 25 and the US at number 30, while Sierra Leone, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are in the bottom three places respectively.
The report, which looks at 176 countries, assesses mothers' wellbeing against the same five indicators: lifetime risk of maternal death, under-five mortality rate, expected number of years of formal schooling, gross national income per capita and the participation of women in national government (see page 77 for details on the methodology).
Many of the statistics cited in the report are shocking, exposing wide gulfs between the experiences of mothers, and children, in different countries. In the DRC a woman has a one in 30 chance of dying as a result of giving birth; in Finland, the risk of death is one in 12,200. In the bottom 10 countries, one child in seven dies under the age of five, compared with one in 345 in Finland.
Clearly, the prospects for life, or death, trump all other concerns. But do these five indicators fully capture the experience of mothering? So much debate around parenting in the UK, for example, focuses on the issues of working outside of the home, and childcare – what does it mean for a country to be a good place to be a mother when looked at through this lens? That the NHS saved my daughter's life in the minutes, and days, after her birth is of course central to my own experience of being a mother. But the 18 months since have been overtaken by the more mundane, but still central to her (and my) wellbeing, questions around my return to work, her childcare, the push and pull of competing demands.
Similarly, does the number of female MPs in a country really affect a woman's experience of mothering? What about the role and input of fathers? In your experience, what is it that makes a country a good, or bad, place to be a mother?
