In one short week it has been reported that Britons are putting money and work ahead of having babies, that they are having them later. When they do have babies they don’t know what to do with them: they cry out for subsidised childcare. It also emerged, to add to this general confusion, that a 63-year-old woman psychiatrist — a child psychiatrist of all things — is seven months pregnant with an IVF baby.

An ICM poll found that although people think it is best to have children while young, they feel forced by pressures of career and money and by the difficulties of finding a partner to postpone it — 49% of babies are born to mothers over 30. They would rather get rich and have fun, too: 64% of men and 51% of women think it is more important for women to enjoy themselves than to have children. Only 36% of women believe that people put children ahead of their careers, and only 32% of men believe that women should — a rapid change of perspective. The result is that Britain has an extremely low birth rate of about 1.77, though not as low as in many other European countries.

Those who do finally squeeze out 1.77 children find themselves unfit for purpose, in the current buzz phrase, and unfit for office. We parents are helpless, hopelessly indulgent of these late and inconvenient arrivals in our aspirational lives.

That, at least, is the view of Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. What our poor children get, he says, is “loving neglect”; too soft and self-indulgent to make proper rules and boundaries for them, or even to feed them properly. We park them in front of electronic babysitters to gorge on junk food. Children are then too tired and too wired up on chemical additives to learn at school and, equally importantly, they are a menace to themselves and others, obese, lazy, inattentive and unmanageable.

I think Brookes is right, up to a point. He says this loving neglect is not restricted to feckless or underprivileged families but is found in millions of aspirational middle-class families as well, where parents are exhausted by their work.

That is true in my own observation and, I’m sorry to say, in my own home and among my friends. Perhaps we were overreacting to our own upbringings; mine was certainly strict and not something I wanted to repeat for my own children. Or perhaps we were and are spoilt ourselves, the me generation, more interested in money and fun than in bringing up baby. However, for some reason and not much to my credit, my children have turned out all right. Perhaps it was the organic broccoli.

All this affluent neglect coincides oddly with a new obsession with every aspect of pregnancy and giving birth and above all with the baby as fashion accessory. No self-respecting film star would admit to anything less than an intense hunger for, or passionate attachment to, babies. Celebs love to be photographed with them, thus displaying their emotional street cred (and that includes male stars like Brad Pitt). Almost any alpha female will proudly describe how intensely maternal she is. Indeed, above a certain high-income level, having lots of babies is a status symbol.

There is also a certain status in extended fertility because it so clearly suggests extended youth — that latterday holy grail. I’m not suggesting that this kind of motive was what impelled Patricia Rashbrook to have a high-tech baby at 63, with a husband of 61, but I can’t help wondering just what her motive was.

She has two children, so it cannot be a never-fulfilled longing for motherhood. As a child psychiatrist she might be supposed to have some special sensitivity for children’s needs, above and beyond their parents’. She is a doctor so she might be expected to understand the grave risks to her baby’s health of such an experiment, and the enormous medical cost to the National Health Service if anything goes wrong. When her baby is 18 she will be 81, if she is still alive, and the father will be nearly 80.

Although most people agree about the phenomenon of affluent neglect and poor parenting, the government has a preposterous plan to make it worse by providing “wraparound educare”. By 2010 all schools will be open for 10 hours a day, right round the year, offering pre-school breakfast and after-school child-minding. In a terrible tribute to the wretched former education secretary, these are called the “Kelly hours”.

This does not strike me as a constructive response to the neglect of children. As Jill Kirby has argued eloquently in a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, this is the nationalisation of childhood. That is something all totalitarian states have attempted, with tragic results.

So once again I am forced to agree with Brookes’ view that schools are in danger of becoming a national babysitting service as some parents wash their hands of their responsibilities.

What on earth is going on? What do we think children are for? Clearly this government thinks they should grow up to be good little workers and taxpayers, most of them — on current employment patterns — in the employment of the state. But parents’ feelings are more mysterious. It seems to me rather pointless to have children if you see them as a nuisance — or as a status symbol, for that matter.

There is no moral requirement on anyone to have children. There are plenty of people who want to come here to live and work, and we are certainly not facing a population shortage. Let people enjoy other things, if they so choose. But it seems worse than pointless to have 1.77 children only to hand them over to the state. It is nationalised baby farming. It’s not just that this general approach is selfish, although clearly it is; it seems like a faintly pathological attitude to parenthood, part of a general disturbance of patterns of breeding that suggests a much wider, much more profound social disturbance.

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