A mother’s place is in the wrong

The latest heart-sinking bits of research – almost literally – claims that we spend more money and less time on our children than other European countries and that sending babies and toddlers to nurseries can send their levels of stress hormones soaring. This means they could be more likely to have lots of coughs and colds when they are young and at greater risk of heart disease when they’re older.

Well, thanks a bunch.

You wonder, really, what mothers can do right. Work and you’re damned as greedy and neglectful.

Stay at home and you’re lazy and smug. Hey ho. Just accept that a mother’s place is in the wrong and get on with it.

Well yes, maybe nurseries can cause stress in some children. So can being at home with a wretchedly miserable mother.

And don’t tell me about the Fifties, that apparently Golden Age when all mothers stayed at home knitting pies and teaching their babies to play the piano and children ran free in a real live Enid Blyton world.

Oh yes?

My mother went out to work. But with a few nice middle class exceptions, most of my friends’ mothers, home all day with apparently all the time in the world, were as frazzled and fraught as she was and today’s stressed-out mums are. And far more neglectful of their children.

We could disappear from dawn to dusk and, as long as we were home for tea, no one had a clue what we were up to. Wonderful. Even tinies at home had to amuse themselves while mother baked, cooked from scratch, peeled mountains of vegetables and did the washing by hand, and probably made a lot of the clothes, too. Housework was pretty much a full-time job and children had to fit in around the edges, keep away from the wash boiler and not mucky the clean floor.

Come the holidays, ten-year-old girls would set themselves up as childminders. Even eight-year-olds would often have a pushchair and a couple of toddlers in tow. We would get on with our usual games and pastimes, just keeping a vague eye on the little ones and moving pushchairs out of the range of cricket balls.

On one of our William and the Outlaw- type adventures, my ten-year-old cousin nearly drowned his two-yearold sister when he dropped her from a fallen tree that we were wriggling along to cross a river. We dragged her out and dried her off and she was too young to tell on us.

Which, frankly, makes today’s nursery care sound a much safer bet.

You, of course, might have had a perfectly idyllic childhood, all Startrite sandals, violin lessons and home-made fairy cakes. In which case you were very lucky and privileged and possibly more exceptional than you realise.

Most parents want the best for their children. Most muddle along getting it more or less right most of the time. Most children of responsible parents turn into responsible adults, however it’s done.

So stop feeling guilty and just talk to your children – it’s much more rewarding than reading surveys.

New term, same old story

SO barely two weeks into the new term and how’s it going?

At a guess, I’d say your darlings have already ripped their new trousers/shirt/ridiculously expensive jacket they pressurised you into buying.

• They’ve made at least five new best friends and fallen out with four of them.

• They have the wrong sort of pen/ calculator/French dictionary. All your fault, of course.

• They’ve left their games kit/recorder/ jumper/maths homework on the bus.

• They’ve come home in someone else’s blazer and minus one trainer.

• They’ve mastered an entirely new vocabulary that has absolutely nothing to do with language lessons.

• They are no longer startlingly smart and clean and new, but are already a bit dog-eared, scruffy and starting to adapt their uniform in blatant defiance of school rules.

• And they have rude nicknames for some of the teachers.

Settled in nicely, then...

Topman

AFTER protests, Topman have withdrawn a pretty objectionable range of T-shirts, which included one with the slogan “Nice girlfriend. What breed is she?”

Shame.

A man in a T-shirt like that might just as well have a sign around his neck saying “Brainless, sexist idiot”.

Now we’ll have to talk to him to find out. Should take, oh, at least five seconds.

Frugal times go west

SO much for the recession. The UK’s biggest shopping mall opened this week – Westfield Stratford City, in London’s East End. Hours before it opened, people were queuing to get in and almost immediately the place was packed as customers flocked to the 300 shops and 70 restaurants, proving that even when times are hard, shopping is what we do best. The new shopping centre is the gateway to the 2012 Olympics.

Fantastic. If only shopping were an Olympic sport, we’d be guaranteed to be top of the medal table.

I wasn’t a patch on Lily

SUPERSTAR Lily Allen has gone all domestic. Once known for partying with Amy Winehouse, now she’s happily married, pregnant again after a stillbirth, and joyously turning herself into a happy little housewife.

“Being at home, looking after your family, taking pleasure in cooking and being houseproud are all valid and valuable,” she says.

She’s even started using her husband’s name and goes as Mrs Cooper.

Such overwhelming domesticity is so against the current trend that it is, of course, beyond fashionable. She’s even bought a sewing machine and is making a cot valance.

Ah yes. I remember those days.

In the later stages of pregnancy and overwhelmed by nest-building hormones, I started making a patchwork quilt. Thirty years later, the patches, still not joined up, are in a bag in the attic.

Maybe the new Lily Cooper will be more determined than I was.

Spectacularly daft

VICTORIA Beckham, newly recovered from a bad back, looked spectacularly daft as she tottered out on 6in heels clutching tiny baby Harper Seven. On the other hand, she also took Harper with her to the launch of her latest fashion collection. You might think that a tiny baby is the ultimate fashion accessory, but I prefer to think that Mrs B just actually wanted her baby with her. Which is somehow very cheering.

Happier and healthier

PEOPLE who get up earlier in the morning are happier and healthier than those who lie in, say researchers.

They’re certainly a lot happier than their partners, who are woken by this relentless early morning cheeriness when all they want is another half hour’s undisturbed kip.

Marriages have foundered on less.

Then let’s see how happy they are...

Backchat

Dear Sharon,
YOUR comment that when you wanted credit in the Seventies you had to have the form signed by a man took me back to our early married days in the Sixties when I was working full time to support my husband who had returned to university.

Although I was the one whose earnings were supporting us both, when we had to buy a bed on HP, as it then was, David had to fill in the forms.

He also had to do the income tax return as my wages were considered to belong to him.

My grand-daughters think this is positively Victorian, and I’m glad that things have changed.

Margaret Kirkup (by email)