- guardian.co.uk, Sunday March 30 2003 00.55 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday March 30 2003
And two in five mothers say they do more than three-quarters of the work associated with having children, according to a nationwide study of motherhood in the twenty-first century.
'In some ways things seem easier today than they were a generation ago,' said Justine Roberts, who carried out the research for Momsnet, the internet advice service. 'There's heaps of advice and information for parents alongside a myriad of books. However, 50 years ago everyone was much less judgmental than today, and you just got on with it. Today there is much more pressure on mothers to get parenting right.'
Mothers are four times more worried that their children are in danger from road traffic than that they might become victims of paedophiles. The figures suggest mothers have a far firmer grasp on the realities of childhood in modern Britain than those newspapers which have encouraged the notion of a universal paedophile menace.
There were 98 child homicides in 2001, the latest year for which figures are available. In the same year there were 15,819 road accidents involving children. More than 3,000 were killed or seriously injured.
Huge numbers of mothers are worried about the stresses of parenthood. Almost six in 10 feel guilty some or all of the time about the amount of time they spend with their children. Two in five feel guilty about shouting at their children. One in four worries that they don't stimulate their children enough.
'Guilt is a big bag that the midwives deliver along with the placenta,' said one mother of two. 'Children will reach 16 and still say that whatever route you took was the wrong one. Hopefully when they get to 18, they will suddenly realise what it's all about.'
Another mother of two said: 'I've just come back from a wedding. I talked to other mothers, some working, some not working, some who wish they were and some who wish they weren't. All were wracked with guilt of some sort or another. Funnily enough, not many of the men were having the same conversation.'
Phillip Hodson, of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, said: 'Being a mother is a job you can't win at. Children need diverse experiences of life, including getting to know how to handle other people's emotions - and that includes your temper.
'What we should be trying to do as parents is judge the rate at which we introduce children to the adult world, not protect them from those difficulties altogether. Emotional intelligence is all about understanding that we do have rows and get stressed and how we cope with that.'
Mothers chose TV chef Nigella Lawson as Britain's best public role model. Lawson has two children by her late husband, John Diamond, but still pursues an energetic career as a broadcaster and writer. Cherie Booth and Victoria Beckham were runners-up.
However, while figures such as David Beckham may be feted for taking a day off training to look after an ailing toddler, women clearly don't think that all men fairly share the burden of child-rearing.
'What makes me explode is when my husband says something like "What is he having for lunch?",' said one mother of one. But another admitted: 'I snipe at my partner all the time about domestic organisation.
'However, if he takes any initiative I hate the "challenge" to my order.'
'For all that we think things have changed, society still expects mother to do the mothering role and fathers to be the breadwinners,' said Roberts, who surveyed a representative sample of 1,013 mothers across Britain. 'We still haven't got very far in terms of making a work-life balance work.
'How many workplaces have functioning creches? How possible is it to find affordable childcare?'
