CUE PURSED lips and disapproval: while feckless mothers sneak off to enjoy themselves in the workplace, “record numbers” of children under 5 are going to day nurseries. Almost 12,000 of these institutions now tend to 704,200 children, representing a rise of 31 per cent in five years and providing ample fodder for a rash of social studies showing that children thus cared for become more disobedient and disruptive than those looked after by their mothers at home.

In fact, most of the small print also adds that such irritating behaviour is only marginally increased and it has also been shown that the nursery alumni go on to do better both at school and later in life. Next week a new book called What Children Need by Jane Waldfogel, an American professor of childcare, goes further: it suggests that at least part-time work is actually positive for mother and child. But no matter. The guilt-inducing damage to parents is already done by the implicit perpetuation of the most tenacious of contemporary myths: that young children historically, traditionally and therefore properly have grown up under the constant, vigilant, hands-on care of their mothers.

The truth is that this has never been the case. Further: it is not the part-time mother who has been fashioned by and for modern woman; it is the full-time mother who is recent — a construct, actually, of only the past three or four decades. Before that, women had neither the time, the luxury nor, in many cases, the inclination to devote their waking hours to the raising of their children.

Rich women, certainly, were never so inclined. Maternity and wet nurses leapt in at the cessation of labour, to be replaced by nannies and later by governesses; centuries of aristocracy were littered with mothers who would not have expected ever to see their own children naked. They would no more involve themselves with the messy demands of either ends of the infant body than they would consider a child’s competence with his letters or her embroidery to be any of their business.

Nor was this simply the entitlement of the uppermost elite. Even the relatively solvent middle classes sought to avail themselves of similar service; Mrs Winifred Banks might not have had a board meeting to chair, but nevertheless thought it quite her due that Mary Poppins should dance attendance upon her offspring. Indeed, when the Norland Institute was established in 1892, its famous nannies were trained to expect that all aspects of the care and upbringing of children would be wholly delegated to them. In recent years, to be fair, this assumption has softened to allow the possibility that interested parents might care to have a say; still, one meets grown men who will shed a heavier tear at the death of their old nanny than of their old Mater.

Poor women, traditionally, did not sit around all day minding their toddlers. Chance would have been a fine thing. Poor women worked in fields and factories, often with babies strapped to them until they had given birth to enough of them that the older cared for the younger in a haphazard daisy chain of comfort — and when mother and children saw each other at the beginning or end of the day, it was a brief encounter across the additional labours of feeding and cleansing essentials.

And so to the middle classes, those most beset today by weighing guilt against gain and most susceptible to the accusation that the daily excursions by women to places of earning are robbing their children of the dedicated childraising selflessly exemplified by their mothers and grandmothers before them. To them one can only say this: beware, for propaganda has sapped accuracy from your memory.

Certainly these women leant to the selfless. But they were not, ever, full-time mothers; they were, as their husbands and their status required, full-time housewives. A different matter altogether.

The nuclear family, progeny of the Industrial Revolution and its requirement for smaller, more mobile units of workforce, heralded the division of labour whereby he worked outside the home, she in it; he brought home the bacon, she cooked it. And from the late 18th century right up until, perhaps, the late 1960s – oh boy, did she earn her keep.

My grandmother had only a pantry, my mother a small fridge. There were no freezers and no supermarkets to fill them, so shopping was a daily trudge because, of course, women didn’t drive. Washing took a whole, miserable, steamy Monday of mangles and pegs and lines, carpets came clean by beating and floors by scrubbing, biscuits and scones weren’t bought but sifted, rubbed and baked. The practice of childcare (a word as yet not invented) involved a kindly but determined shooing “outside to play”, whereupon we happily scarpered until teatime rumbled tummies.

My mother taught us to read, then largely left us to it; she would try to sit down for a cuddle come Andy Pandy, even though when she did it was often the only time she sat all day. Everybody’s mother was exactly the same; none of us felt deprived in any way — but to call us a full-time task would have been as inaccurate as it would have been unwelcome.

Only now, this now of domestic labour-saving devices and Tesco home deliveries and SUVs for school-runs, only now might the woman who eschews the labour market call herself — in the absence of anything else she has to do — a full-time mother. And bully for her, if it is what she chooses, if she has found someone else to pay for it, if she is immune to accusations of indulgence and idleness or if she believes, as many sincerely do, that her permanent presence is in the better interests of her children.

But if she then justifies her choice, in the process provoking unease in parents who have chosen otherwise, by suggesting that it is she who adheres to a proven, time-honoured pattern for child-rearing, then it is she — not they — who is wrong.

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