Far from happily balancing work, kids and their social lives, modern women still secretly prefer their men to be the provider. But why is that?

SO women still want to marry Mr Darcy. Of course we do. We’re not stupid. According to new research, most women still prefer to marry a man who earns more than they do, preferably a lot more.

Come to that, I expect quite a lot of men would be happy to marry a woman with plenty of cash too.

Makes life easier, doesn’t it?

Occasionally in my life I went out with rich men. Such joy. For a peasant such as myself used to a lifetime of watching every penny, reckless extravagance was like being transported to another world. But then I ended up down to earth, marrying a journalist, as broke as I was, and have worked for my living ever since.

But a girl can dream...

The thinking behind women’s preference is, allegedly, that we would then be able to stay at home with our children. Well, yes, many mothers, especially of very young c h i l d r e n , would love to be with their children and not have to worry about money. But it’s tricky to do both these days.

But let’s be honest. It’s not just the children we’re thinking of here, is it?

The days when housework or child raising was a full-time job have long gone. Being at home with your children also gives you a lot of time to do other things as well. I ran a fulltime freelance career around mine.

Others managed part-time work and/or quite a nice social life in between cooking, gardening, scraping mashed banana off the walls and tormenting their babies with flash cards.

Most mothers still want the choice of whether to stay at home or go out to work, in whatever ratio. And have time for lunch. The more money the children’s father has, the easier the choice is. Which is why we will always yearn for a Mr Darcy.

Whether we get him, of course, is quite another matter.

THE thank you letters have arrived.

Promptly and beautifully written by my great nieces – while their brother’s card, shorter, scruffier – limps onto the mat ten days later, with our address filled in by his mother.

And I appreciate the effort. Not just the children’s in writing, but the superhuman amount of nagging, cajoling, bribery and downright anger it must have taken my niece to get her son to sit down and actually write.

I remember it well. Exhausting.

My only bargaining tool was refusing to let my sons have their birthday/ Christmas money until they’d written the thank you letter for it.

So what price Tiger Mothers?

Tiger Mothers are a terrifying parenting phenomenon and the reason that Chinese children are always top of the lists at school and lead the world rankings.

Their mothers make them work.

Really work. Amy Chua is a professor at Yale University and she still finds time to supervise her daughter’s violin and piano practice for three hours every day. And now she’s written a book about it to make the rest of us feel even more hopelessly inadequate than before.

Her daughters weren’t allowed to watch television, play computer games or go on sleepovers. They had other things to do. Anything less than an A grade was not acceptable, not even A minus. Not surprisingly, both girls have amazing exam results and play piano and violin to professional standards.

And don’t even mention junk food and inappropriate clothing. I bet they wrote their thank you letters even before they had their birthday breakfast.

A friend’s daughter once lived in a university hall of residence with a lot of Chinese girls. She never saw them. Every evening and all weekend, they sat in their rooms working, just occasionally scurrying down the corridor to use the bathroom or kitchen, so she knew they were alive.

And yes, you can say that they were hardly making the most of the opportunities of student life. On the other hand, they probably got brilliant jobs at the end of it and didn’t waste a fortune on binge drinking.

Tricky isn’t it?

Most of us seem to have lost the knack of assertive parenting. Most of us wouldn’t want to be Tiger Mothers. But it makes you think, doesn’t it, how things could be done.

In the meantime, you’d better go and crack the whip over those thank you letters.

ONE in three women won’t go out of their front door unless they’ve got their make-up on. Quite right too.

If you think I look rough now, you should see me without my slap on.

Now that would definitely frighten the horses.

CONGRATULATIONS to former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly, 53, for winning an employment tribunal case against the BBC on the grounds of ageism.

But the real winners are all those 40-something women still working in television, who face a constant battle to look younger than they are.

Such a relief that a wrinkle is no longer a sacking offence. Even Fiona Bruce, 46, pert owner of the Rear of the Year, might let herself sag a little.

Just a little.

It’s only right that as the population ages, that television reflects that. We need grown-ups – sensible, competent people who know what they’re talking about and can do so without giggling.

On the other hand, in a year or two when everyone on our screens is about 129, what’s the betting that we’re all longing for some youthful freshness and energy on our screens again?

Ageism is easy to deal with. It’s getting the balance right that’s going to be tricky.

EDWARD Woollard, 18, did a stupid and dangerous thing – in the middle of a student demonstration he threw a fire extinguisher from a rooftop.

It didn’t hit anyone. But it could have. It just missed a row of police officers and could quite easily have killed one of them. His brave and determined mother drove him to the police station to hand himself in.

As a result, Edward, a promising student, has been jailed for two years and eight months. Gulp. It’s hard not to think of little villains who do far worse, far more often, and have received barely a slapped wrist.

On the other hand, you can be sure that many more students, faced with a rooftop and a handy heavy extinguisher, will now think twice, even in the heat of the moment.

Edward’s mother collapsed in court, blaming herself for the