Forget a fancy car or multiple foreign holidays a year, having three children is fast becoming the ultimate status symbol.
Many of the nation’s most beloved mothers have a triptych brood in tow, from Holly Willoughby to Kate Middleton, and recently – in news that stopped the toddlers of the nation in their tracks – we can add Mummy Pig (that’s Peppa Pig’s mother, to the uninitiated) to that list too.
Aside from provoking a few sweat-inducing questions about how the baby got in Mummy Pig’s tummy in the first place and how it’s going to get out, the news that Britain’s favourite porcine household is expanding this summer has paved way for some pretty telling discourse around who on earth can afford a third mouth to feed in the current economic climate.
The facts speak for themselves. Families – mothers, especially – are more cash-strapped and time-poor than ever. Britain has some of the highest childcare fees in the world and the never-ending cost of living crisis means that 31% (amounting to around 4.5million) of the nation’s children live in relative poverty.
In such a climate, having any children at all has become an increasingly unappealing (or impossible) prospect – evidenced by the fact that fertility rates in England and Wales are at an all-time low.
Perhaps that’s why being able to have a third child, and all the financial implications that brings, is being seen as the new marker of genuine wealth. It’s an indulgence akin to owning a Range Rover or a holiday home in the south of France.
So I can’t help but question: What kind of woman is seen as wealthy, aspirational, and even quirky for having more than two kids? And more to the point, what kind of woman is seen as the opposite – careless, promiscuous, backwards, or a drain on the state for breeding more than the socially acceptable amount?
The caricature of a mother with lots of kids is one that featured heavily in the kind of tasteless reality television that I grew up on. In programmes like Benefits Street or The Jeremy Kyle Show, having many children was presented as a nefarious way to leech money from the Government or a ticket to a life claiming benefits without having to do any ‘real work’.
Women with kids from multiple fathers or living in a large house paid for by the council were the ultimate villain. It certainly wasn’t a status symbol.
Still today, far from signalling prestige, for some women having many children is a source of our vilification.
For many kinds of mothers – such as those who are visibly Muslim like me – having multiple children actively otherises us. It is a sign of our failure to integrate by sticking to backwards, domestic, foreign ways of living rather than obeying western capitalism’s demands to churn out a tidy 2.4 babies and then get back to (paid) work.
Whenever I’m in public with my slightly unruly toddler and a newborn baby yet to grasp social cues, I can’t help but feel like the tuts and looks so often received by mothers for daring to make noise in public are this time tinged with Islamophobia, too.
Like the mere sight of a Muslim mother with multiple children is evidence of far-right conspiracies that Britain is being taken over by people like me.
For friends of mine with three or more children, this becomes even more acute – with comments thrown at them in public about Muslims having too many children when their children are seen as out of control.
Over a decade ago, sensationalist headlines were reporting the ‘startling’ rise of Muslims in the UK, as census 2011 figures found that almost a tenth of new babies in England and Wales were Muslim.
This paranoia has persisted. Counter-terror strategy has often laid the blame for radicalisation at the feet of Muslim mothers. And in 2016, The Telegraph reported that David Cameron privately suggested that one of the main reasons young men are vulnerable to radicalisation is the ‘traditional submissiveness of Muslim women’.
This still exists today, with a new wave of Islamophobia every time Muhammad tops the list of most popular boys’ names.
Just last year, Lord Pearson of Rannoch made a speech in the House of Lords warning how ‘radicals’ will ‘take us over’ through ‘the power of the womb’. Or Nigel Farage claiming in February that we need ‘higher birth rates’ in the same breath as talking about Britain’s ‘Judeo-Christian culture’.
For Muslim women, having lots of kids isn’t a status symbol, it renders us an active threat.
As a teacher, I’ve witnessed assumptions made about the sort of mother who has four or five children in schools I have worked in – and it’s no coincidence that it’s not the large families with children called Sebastian, Arabella, and Penelope who are on the receiving end of these stereotypes.
Children from big, working-class, ethnic minority households carry the presumption that the parents don’t care about school or can barely keep track.
Sometimes I’ve even known fellow teachers to not bother informing home when something has happened in school, assuming that a mother with five kids is a backwards, foreign woman unable to speak English and too busy cooking a curry to understand what happens within a classroom.
But it’s not just that having any more than the neat, average, acceptable two children is berated for some and celebrated in others. It is actively penalised by fiscal policies for anyone who is reliant upon them.
Take the two-child benefit cap. Allowing parents to only claim Universal Credit for their first two children cements a double standard in which the state (despite desperately needing fertility rates to rise) deliberately prices certain types of people out of even considering having a large family by punishing them with further poverty.
So yes, while it’s truer than ever that only an ever-narrowing section of society can comfortably afford adding a third child, the fact is that large families will always exist – whether through choice or otherwise.
And while we all herald the family of five as the new epitome of affluence, let’s not forget those on the flip side – the mothers whose otherisation seems to only get worse with each child they give birth to.
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