Too many cooks?

MOTHER knows best. Ha! It's a long time since anyone said that and meant it. Mothers, it seems, know nothing.

Well, that's the impression you'd get from all the TV programmes, self-help books, websites and government initiatives, all of which seemed designed to tell parents in general and mothers in particular that they're doing a rubbish job of bringing up their children.

Which only makes you wonder how the human race has struggled along this far from the primeval swamp without the advice of supernannies and childcare gurus and the government's book for dads.

I mean, look at us, we're perfect, aren't we? Our mums must have made a reasonable fist of it.

Now there's a backlash. An international academic conference has been looking at the "intensive parenting" industry and is - hooray - none too impressed. What they're saying, basically, is that all these experts - many of them giving contradictory advice - are making parents feel helpless, hopeless and unsure of what to do.

It's a vicious circle. Parents' confidence is undermined. Stress levels soar. They get rattier. Kids run riot. Chaos ensues and the total breakdown in society is predicted sometime before your children finally, if ever, leave home.

"We are treating parents like idiots," says Professor Frank Furedi.

Childcare fads and fashions change with every generation, of course, if only to give grannies something to despair over. So you can pick and mix really - breast v bottle; strict routine v feed on demand; seen and not heard or encouraged to join in; rules, rewards and star charts or hugs and kisses and a trip to MacDonalds.

Every expert has a different approach. Every expert has a theory. Every expert has their fans.

But you're the one who knows your children. And you love them more than the experts do. Unlike the experts, you have to live with them and have to find something that works for you.

Out of all the millions of words written on the subject, and now all the websites and TV programmes, there is one sentence from one expert that should be drummed into every new mother.

Dr Benjamin Spock - one of the earliest and most famous childcare experts - almost dismissed his own book in one sentence to parents. "Trust yourself - you know more than you think you do."

And that's one bit of expert advice definitely worth listening to.

IN a bid to cut waste, Marks & Spencer are to charge shoppers 5p for every plastic bag. Good. Though when it comes to packaging and M&S, they could do a lot more to put their own house in order first.

No matter. It all helps.

It's actually a retro move. Shops always used to charge for carrier bags. Before that, of course, our mothers always took their own shopping bags and baskets.

Try putting a week's supermarket shop into a couple of those willow shopping baskets and a string bag. Maybe just a retro step too far.

WHAT'S really depressing about the argument over grammar schools is that many of us who were schooled in them are old enough to remember when independent education was considered second best to the state system.

Gosh, that was a long time ago.

Apart from the really top public schools, private schools were where you went as a last resort, if your parents had money and you'd failed the 11 Plus. Our local fee-paying college was considered pretty much a dumping ground for the thick sons of rich farmers. That's how it was then.

Much has been made of how grammar schools gave poor kids a chance. Proportionately, far more working class children went to university in the 1950s and 60s than they do now. But grammar schools also attracted the children of the well-to-do who saw no point in shelling out for school fees when their children could get a better education for free. It provided as great a social mix as comprehensives are meant to.

In the 1960s the gap between the top public schools and the top grammars was barely discernible. Now the gap between public schools and the bog standard comprehensive is, too often, a yawning gulf, almost unbridgeable.

It doesn't matter much if you call them city academies, grammar schools, specialist colleges, comprehensives or any other name. What matters is that education - for every child - must be a real priority.

But not until, once again, the rich decide that school fees are a waste of money, will we be really sure that we've cracked it