“The idea of supporting mothers is really welcome, but in this way the project will not be able to serve its goals”

“I have been deeply convinced for quite a long time that we need serious legislative changes, especially to enable mothers to work at the same time survive in the labor market and to maintain a certain balance between their work and family life so that they have time and energy to participate in their children’s lives and in general to think about having the next child. This requires complex reforms, first and foremost, giving the importance to these issues and the extensive discussions with working or potential working mothers and fathers, “says Tatevik Davtyan, a civil activist who has previously been one of the initiators of the scandalous fight against change in the Law on “Temporary Invalidity and Maternity Benefits”.

WomenNet.am talked to her about the so-called “nanny at the expense of the state”, the details of which were published recently on the government’s E-draft website. It should be noted that she had published her own idea on this project, with her own initiative earlier making an extensive record on her Facebook page. And that post was a reason for our conversation, which, by the way, had been before the project mechanisms were clarified when it was not clear what kind of restrictions it might assume.

Our interlocutor, Tatevik Davtyan is convinced that the idea itself is to support the mothers so that they can return to work and combine it with their family responsibilities, and it is truly welcoming and there is no second opinion here. But the idea, according to her, is not enough, because the most important is the mechanism of implementation, and the last discussion in the National Assembly has come to prove it. If the outcome of the policy is very small, you cannot expect that you will help someone or give them a real opportunity to return to the labor market and solve a demographic problem. At best, she said, all this can be viewed as a first step.

“My concern is that in the last few years, some unrelated individual steps have been taken to alleviate the demographic situation, but the situation does not change, which gives me the right to suppose that here we are more likely to deal with the PR-campaign of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs rather than a serious change that caused such an excitement, ” said our interlocutor.

Full text in Armenian