The full-time mother is a relatively new concept and not an entirely helpful one.

So when was this Golden Age of full-time mothering then? First of all Gwyneth Paltrow has caused a storm by criticising working mothers. And now a new trend has been spotted in the United States -mothers who don't work, but who have nannies, cleaners, gardeners, leaving them with plenty of time to flit between lunch and the leisure club.

(That sigh you heard was envy...)

And it's all sparked this sort of feeling that yes, maybe a mother's place is with her children, all the time.

But the idea of being a full-time mother is still very new. Even in the 1950s, when life was most like those Ladybird books, when Daddy went to work and Mummy stayed at home with Janet and John, Mummy wasn't so much a full-time mother as a full-time housekeeper - shopping every day, cooking meals from scratch, often making most of the family's clothes, doing the washing by hand, baking, cleaning, everything took so much longer.

And yes, sometimes the children were in the kitchen joining in, or trotting along to the shops. But often they weren't. They were shooed out from under Mother's feet, usually outdoors, often running wild, William and the Outlaws style.

Mothers didn't bother with flash cards for toddlers or revision guides for five-year-olds, because they were too busy boiling their white wash, putting clothes through the mangle or trying to make three bobs' worth of liver into a meal for four.

Before that, the idea of full-time mothering was absolutely alien. The rich had servants to care for their children. Even the only moderately well off had some sort of help.

The poor went out to work and left their children with whoever would look after them. And families were bigger. Many mothers had ten or a dozen children - that's not full-time mothering, that's crowd control.

Now full-time mothers of school age children are becoming the exception. Their time is not spent cooking or cleaning or mangling, but in ferrying children between endless after-school classes and activities. Sometimes this is for the children's benefit, but occasionally it looks as though mothers are trying to justify their stay-at-home existence.

If you want to go out to work, fine. If you want to go for a swim, have lunch with friends, equally fine.

All that matters is that your children are happy and flourishing, with or without you constantly hovering over them.

Throughout history, very few children ever have had their mother's undivided attention.

Children need lots of love, attention and security. But sometimes they need a little healthy neglect too. After all, it's worked pretty well for a few thousand years - and we're here to prove it.

OH no. A health psychologist has said that hospitals should encourage visits from patients' pets. I'm sure that seeing their pets would have a wonderfully restorative effect on their owners. But what about the rest of us?

Hospital wards are already torture chambers - constant television, light, other people's noisy all day visitors, out of control toddlers. A few yapping dogs, twittering budgies or stalking cats would just finish it off nicely.

And all proves my theory - to cope successfully with hospital, you really have to be fighting fit.

LITTLE boys have always wanted to be soldiers and teenage fashion will always be daft.

But as we watch the TV news and see nearly every night children dying in explosions and attacks, others lucky to survive let alone lead a normal life, the current fashion for camouflage clothes seems distinctly odd.

And when it's used for baby clothes and buggies in our safe and ordered streets, it's just downright crass.

Published: 12/05/2004