The stay-at-home inequality

David and Elisabeth* seemed to me a practically perfect couple. Urbane, fun and attractive, they moved to Paris when David’s company transferred him and his girlfriend Elisabeth moved with him. I met them after I’d spent months drinking carafes of red wine alone in cafes, being buffeted by Parisian bureaucracy and inscrutable French mores. They threw dinner parties and cocktail parties and were just...

Is being a mother an important job?

At a school careers day a while back, my daughter knew what she wanted to dress up as: “I’m going as a mother!” she said. Of course that’s FINE. But we talked about how mothers can also be other things, like, y’know, Freudian analysts. In the end she decided to go as Amelia Earhart, whose flying attire is jauntier than that of mothers or shrinks. But in recent years – and indeed...

How much should you supervise playdates?

Another day, another playdate, another late afternoon wrestling with the dilemma: how much do I need to supervise these little monsters? When it’s just my daughter and her older brother, I’m content to let them disappear for ages, knowing that the older one will keep the younger from practising flying out of upstairs window, and the little one will tell on the older one taking scissors to the soft...