Mothers Matter podcast

Despite resigning from her post as Editor and Vice Chair of Mothers At Home Matter, Claire Paye is still as busy as ever working for the cause of ‘mothers based at home’. Her latest, very exciting venture, is a podcast called Mothers Matter.

Inspired by Will Young, who said that podcasts are easy to put together, and incensed by the constant media denigration of the role of mothers, I have launched a podcast called Mothers Matter, available at the link below and on iTunes soon.

My aim is to give a voice to mothers ‘and the children who love them’. I want to put children’s needs centre stage as so often the debate about the role of mothers is couched solely in terms of mothers’ ‘right’ to work, rather than their children’s ‘right’ to spend their days being loved by their mothers.

So much of the media space is taken up talking about how anyone other than the mother should be looking after children. If mothers are mentioned, it is to highlight how they are failing their children by not talking to them enough, or not feeding them the right food, or pushing a forward facing pram around, without any awareness that many mothers are absent from their children’s lives for many hours of the day and therefore it is their absence that is making the difference, as much as what they are doing when they are there.

The media is staffed, necessarily, by mothers who are being paid to work outside the home and who are outsourcing childcare. Mothers who do not get paid because they are caring for their children themselves full time do not get a voice. If they are interviewed – as Lynne and I have been, frequently, for Mothers at Home Matter, it is by a man (who would not dare follow a line of questioning that might suggest he wishes his children’s mother was caring full time for their children) or by a mother who has her own sense of guilt that she is not with her children, or who genuinely believes her children are better off in nursery than at home with her.

In my podcast I want to celebrate the vital and irreplaceable work that mothers do and look at a whole host of issues through the prism of the mother who is primarily caring for her children. (Note how hard I’m trying to avoid the phrase ‘stay at home mother’. I hate it. Listen to my podcast for why!)

Some of you know that I have been involved with Mothers at Home Matter for several years, latterly as the newsletter editor and Vice Chair. I stepped down in November in order, partly, to give more time to the solar light charity I run – the Mwezi Foundation. However, having recently got into listening to podcasts, I feel they are a significant medium through which to communicate and may be especially useful for busy mothers who are cooking, running parent taxis, breastfeeding or doing the other many tasks that are required to get the family through the day. I am very grateful to Anne and MAHM for some financial and lots of emotional support as I set up the podcast.

I’m keeping it independent of MAHM for now to give me some editorial leeway and also to draw any flak away from MAHM. I should be able to be a bit more direct than MAHM would be able to be.

Will Young, I must say, is wrong. It is not easy to set up a podcast and having wept my way through Audacity and Wavelab, trying to sort out ‘gain’ and ‘denoise’, I have now engaged the paid services of a podcast audio expert. I expect Will Young is surrounded by such gems.

I would love to hear from anyone who has a story to tell and would like me to talk with them on the podcast. Topics are going to include: maternal mental health, housing, family taxation, mothering children who are high achievers at sports, universal credit, mothering teenagers, identity, loneliness, boys and why they struggle more in childcare, returning to work, childcare and a whole host of other topics, many of which

I’ve covered in the MAHM newsletter over the past few years. Please do get in touch if you have a story to tell or any topics you would like me to cover.

Claire Paye