What do we get out of Jacinda Ardern's children's book?

Mum’s Busy Work, Dame Jacinda Ardern's children's book, isn’t really a story so much as a schedule in the week of a kid with a working mum.

It opens with something my 4-year-old daughter can relate to: the disappointment of finding out it is Monday, a daycare day.

Leaving your kid crying or sad at daycare is never a great way to start the week. I felt Ardern’s mum's guilt reach through the page and touch my own as I snuggled up on the couch to read Miss 4Mum's Busy Work.

​I wonder if Miss 4 felt heard, too. One scenario in the book covers the nameless mum, let’s just call her Jacinda, sneaking out early to work in her “clippy-cloppy” shoes. My Miss 4 is never happy when she wakes up to no mummy.

It's been a busy year for Ardern. First, it was her much-anticipated memoir, giving somewhat of an inside view into her years spent as New Zealand's prime minister. In September, the documentary Prime Minster dropped on general release in New Zealand detailing essentially the same thing.

Now, it’s the kids’ turn with Mum’s Busy Work, making plain a sore question for working parents: how does our career or job impact our kids and our relationship with them?

​The book comes at a fraught time. All things felt possible in 2018 when ambitious women collectively gushed over images of Ardern with Neve on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly Hall.

​Now, data out of the US shows mums, particularly those with young kids, leaving the workforce in high numbers. While Stats NZ data shows a slight increase in women with young children in the workforce, maternity leave data suggests financial restraints are the main driver for them to return to work (but more on that later).

Although Mum's Busy Work is Ardern’s words, it is her daughter Neve’s view of the years when her prime minister mother steered the country through the tragedies and trials of the Christchurch Terror Attacks, the Whakaari / White Island eruption, and the Covid pandemic. Of course, the book doesn’t delve into those incidents or Ardern’s responses and policies that shaped those years.

We see plenty of the “clippy-cloppy” shoes, a cute term that we might assume Neve used to describe her mum's work shoes. Ardern’s briefcase is ever-present, too. (Husband Clarke Gayford famously describes their relationship as having three participants: him, her, and a briefcase full of policy documents that was lugged daily between the Beehive and home).

The writing isn’t sassy like Lynley Dodd with her clever Hairy Maclary rhymes. In fact, Mum’s Busy Work is rather bland, but kids seem to like their everyday life regurgitated back to them, no matter how lame. It’s comforting.

The simple illustrations are created by Ruby Jones, the New Zealand artist who did theTime Magazine cover following the Christchurch Terror Attacks in 2019.

​I wondered if the book stirred up any thoughts or feelings for Miss 4 with me returning to the workforce full-time a year ago. Instead, my interview was hijacked when she stole my notepad and pen so she could take the notes (she can’t write).

​In the book, Neve dresses up in her mum's clothes and mimics her mother working at the kitchen table. My daughter loves playing “work". A few days ago, she told me: “When I’m older, I want to work in the city and do important things like you, mum.”

​I tried the book on my young school aged son, 6-turning-7. He immediately wrote it off as a “girl book” and said it was dumb. My follow-up questions failed to unearth any lingering bitterness with my job forcing him into after-school care two days a week. ​

The book touches on the painful contradiction of working parents, particularly working mums: we say that our kids are our most important “job” but I find it hard to do both well. It’s fine when it's fine, especially if you have helpful family around, but if you don’t and a wheel falls off - a kid is sick, you’re sick, the car breaks down, or your septic tank fails (my real-life horror story) - then the whole structure collapses immediately.

​Even as I write this story, I just realised that a few dozen ants have gathered to take away the crumbs on my desk at home. We’ve had an ant infestation for weeks, and my husband and I keep hoping the other parent will find the time and energy to hunt down the nest and fumigate it.

Spoiler alert: ​​In the final pages of Mum’s Busy Work, Neve and Jacinda seem to have a joint revelation that Jacinda’s most important job is dancing and building sandcastles with Neve. Perhaps that was the light bulb moment that preceded her resignation as prime minister in January 2023.

​“I know what this job takes and I know I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,” Ardern said at the time during an emotional press conference announcing her resignation.

​To be fair, the role of prime minister would be stressful and demanding beyond words, but that was somewhat offset by Gayford as a stay-at-home dad, supportive grandparents and a half-million dollar salary. Yet, it’s almost unfathomable to me that she was able to do the job while pregnant and with a young baby, but we all have different pregnancies, different temperaments, and babies with various degrees of needs.

​The recent data out of the US shows that the share of working mothers aged 25 to 44 who have young children is dropping. Some of that is to do with companies axing pandemic flexibilities like working from home. A Washington Post article attributed some of the cause to the Make America Great Again and tradwife movements that are permeating social media, including the feeds of New Zealanders, glorifying women as homemakers.

Stats NZ data shows that workforce participation with women who have children under four years old has fluctuated since 2013, but there is steady growth. However, maternity leave data from 2021 shows financial constraints are a big driver for women returning to the workforce earlier than they would prefer.

There are numerous barriers for those who want to return to the workforce. ​ Chief among those obstacles is finding affordable childcare and a job that works for family life, says Stephanie Pow, from Crayon, an organisation that works with employees and employers to reduce financial stress for new parents.

"I do know that basically every survey response that we've seen from other people and also the data that we've collected, flexible working is almost always rated as the number one factor about whether someone can make [their job] work for their lives."

​And it’s hard to know with any data what the individual preference of each mother is, if we didn’t have cost-of-living pressures - does she want to be solely present with her children or continue to maintain and build the professional skills she invested in, or a bit of both?

​“It's hard to find really good, meaningful work that's not full-time work and that has that flexibility,” Pow says.

​So, is Mum’s Busy Work worth the read? Yeah, sure. I felt heard and so did my daughter, I think. Is mum’s busy work, as in my actual job, worth it? Some days yes, some days no. It depends on how my septic tank is doing.