Clodagh Finn: Why Elon Musk bringing his child to work is deeply disquieting
It should be a reason to celebrate when a powerful man and father of 12 brings his child to work. Sadly, it was anything but. Pictures: Alex Brandon
There is something wonderful about seeing a man — let’s include Elon Musk in that, for a moment — go to work with a four-year-old on his shoulders.
It acts as a powerful reminder that parenthood is not separate from the workplace even if society has drawn a thick, impenetrable line between the two. We have been forced to construct entirely distinct work and home personas but, in reality, one always seeps into the other.
Why then, was it deeply disquieting to see a version of that truth go viral when Elon Musk brought his son to the bull’s-eye centre of American power earlier this month?
After all, there is nothing unusual in being alerted to the presence of children in the White House. If President Abraham Lincoln’s youngest son Thomas (Tad) wasn’t always seen, he was certainly heard; lore has it that he once figured out how to make all the bells of the White House ring at once.
There are several photos of President John F Kennedy's children, John Jr and Caroline, visiting their father at work. There is a wonderful one, too, of President Barack Obama’s daughter Sasha apparently staking him out behind an Oval Office sofa.
For me, the most poignant ‘child in the Oval Office’ photo is the one showing five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia touch President Obama’s hair in May 2009. When the little boy asked the president if his hair was like his own, Obama bent down and said: “Why don’t you touch it and see for your yourself?”
White House official photographer Pete Souza captured the moment in a photograph magazine labelled “iconic”. First Lady Michelle Obama later said the image, labelled Hair Like Mine, was a visual representation of the progress made in the African-American struggle for civil rights.
The recent Oval Office photo op is different, of course. Elon Musk is not the president. The efficiency adviser to US president Donald Trump is not even elected. And in these days of an always-on news cycle, analysis is swift — and, in this case, utterly damning.
, to quote one particularly cogent argument, dismissed Musk’s action as a daddy costume play which posed a not-so-subtle threat to all working women. “The kid stays in the picture because he’s a great prop and charming distraction — but how many mothers can cart their children to the office?”
Very few, even if those women have power and influence. Recall New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who made history as recently as 2018 when she brought her baby into a United Nations general assembly meeting. She was the first world leader to do so. She was also the first world leader to take maternity leave.
That depressing stat speaks volumes about the yawning gap between the sphere of politics and the one of parenthood.
It should, then, be a reason to celebrate when a powerful man and father of 12 brings his child to work. Sadly, it was anything but. For one thing, the child’s mother, Canadian musician Grimes, did not want her son, X Æ A-Xii, to give him his full name, paraded in front of the world’s media.
When she was made aware of the White House visit, she wrote: “He should not be in public like this. I did not see this, thank u for alerting me. But I’m glad he was polite. Sigh.”
There was also something really sinister at play. Musk is a pronatalist who believes having as many children as possible is necessary to bring society back from the brink. But he seems interested in building up a particular kind of gene pool — one that is white and "intelligent".
Musk, it was claimed, chose his son X because of all his children, he has the highest IQ (who measures and compares the IQ of their children?) Whatever the truth of that, President Trump’s chilling remark that X was “a high IQ individual” spoke volumes.
Apart from all of that — and that is an awful lot to leave aside — few noted the irony that Musk, the great father, has been doggedly determined in his efforts to make it harder for other working parents to achieve any kind of work-life balance. He is a proponent of long hours and inflexible working conditions, which means other parents can never enjoy the privileges he does.
Remember, too, Musk has serious back-up. When he brought X to see Indian prime minister Narendra Modi a few days later, his three-year-old daughter Azure was in the picture too. And here’s the interesting bit, away from the camera, Musk’s partner Shivon Zilis followed closely with, to quote one report, “an army of nannies”.
Worst of all, behind the cynical photo op is a man hell-bent on slashing and burning so-called wokeism across a number of departments — from energy to education — in the name of efficiency. His Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has already saved the government millions, apparently, but it is doing so by wielding an indiscriminate wrecking ball that will have far-reaching consequences.
When it comes to children, education and supporting working parents, Elon Musk and Doge are unpicking years of hard-won progress.
The slow, painstaking nature of that progress was particularly hard-won in Ireland. The story of how the first day nurseries came into being in the 1940s and 1950s reminds us that such places were once considered controversial.
In a country that had enshrined in its Constitution the importance to the common good of having a woman stay at home, building a nursery to help working mothers was a bold step.
Enter the Ladies Committee of the Civics Institute, a philanthropic organisation which believed better town planning could lead to better quality of life. When one of its projects, St Joseph’s Day Nursery, opened at the Coombe in Dublin in 1956, the noted the facility had grown “out of literally nothing”.
The committee had no money, no place to build and nothing to build it with, the paper noted, and yet it succeeded.
The Civics Institute also managed to convince the government that those proto-creches were designed to strengthen rather than weaken family life.
Speaking of design, the institute’s honorary secretary, architect Máirín Hope, did something radical. She designed (free of a charge) a place that put children at its centre. She also used her architectural training to create sand-gardens, a sand-pit in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and playgrounds — projects informed by her desire to create better facilities for pre-school children.
She founded and was the first chairperson of the Irish Pre-school Playgroups Association in 1969 (Early Childhood Ireland today).
In its own words, Early Childhood Ireland now works to support parents to “ensure quality experiences for children in early years and school age care settings”. Its strategies are based on experience, national and international research, policy and best practice.
Let’s just hope one tech billionaire with a four-year-old on his shoulders will not succeed in tearing down what has, not just in the States but all around the world, taken decades to build.
