When will we stop penalising working mothers?
Arguments about the family rage between left and right and within left and right. All sides make ringing statements of the obvious. ‘Children are brought up best when brought up by their natural parents,’ say conservatives, which is true, on the whole. ‘Couples stay together for longer when they are married,’ they continue, which is also generally the case. ‘Ah, but that doesn’t mean that a single mother can’t bring up children well,’ reply liberals, and that’s true, too, but as with the other platitudes misses the point that it is becoming incredibly expensive to raise a normal family and rational men and women are giving up on the idea. The all too plausible claim from the Commission for Equality and Human Rights that mothers with young children face the greatest employment inequality didn’t quite get to the nub of the matter, because many of the mothers included in its figures may much prefer to look after their children. Far more telling is the fate of mothers who return to work to
