Why is it that all of the ills of society are blamed on working mothers? "Too many mothers are in work and not looking after the children, so children can't always rely upon Mum being there." say the masses. "We need to bring a return to the traditional family where the father goes out to work and the mother stays at home and looks after the children."

Some suggest that we should have one parent stay at home irrespective of gender, but that would lead to the same result, as the mother is still expected to play the main role in bringing up the children- it would mostly be mothers who would stay at home.
Some points:

1. Most children who have two parents who work actually grow up to be good adults, and the ones who turn out badly-behaved, while clearly representing a major problem, are in the minority. And what about the kids brought up by single mothers who turn out reasonably behaved? As usual everyone are being made to suffer because of a minority.

2. If a stay-at-home mum feels she is trapped, she is ruled by her husband and kids, her career sits in tatters and she has no life (which [i]can[/i] happen)- how is that going to be good for the kids? Quantity of time spent with Mum is important- but so is quality.

3. If more employers were willing to offer flexible working patterns and chances for going part-time when bringing up young children where it was feasible, we'd get situations where parents could work, but work at different times so as to ensure that most of the time, at least one of them was available for the children.

Giving mothers more scope to stay at home if they wish to is no problem, but I certainly don't want society to move in the direction of making mothers feel guilty if they work, as if it equates to child neglect. As per point 1 above, only in a minority of cases does this appear to be true.