Shares are in freefall, the FTSE graph fluctuates wildly and most analysts seem to agree that recession is but a teeter away. House prices are down, mortgage applications have dropped, and Monday was officially the most miserable day of the year. For thousands of mothers, however, all this is as nothing, a distant irrelevance. For them, you see, the whole of January, not just the dank depression that was last Monday, is a miserable and terrifying endurance test, during which they must suffer one of the greatest pains known to mothers – the possible rejection of their child – while never letting on for a moment that they are anything other than cheerful, confident and fully in control.

I refer, of course, to the ghastly phenomenon of school selection. It might be the 11-plus, or it might be a Year 6 entrance exam for a private school. In some affluent areas it will be white-faced six and seven-year-olds competing in English, maths and verbal reasoning for entrance to a prep school. For others it could be not an exam at all but the nightmare of state school selection. Or it could be university entrance, or GCSE mocks, or AS levels, or one part of an A level.

Once entered, this world becomes all-encompassing. It involves fierce competition and soul-destroying oneupmanship. It devours every waking minute (and let’s face it, there will be plenty of those, because a good night’s sleep becomes a remote memory for many at this time). Exhausted, and taut with the effort of putting on a good front, the deranged mother finds herself inhabiting any one of three distinct personalities, quite often all in the same day and occasionally, at moments of extreme stress, all in the same hour.

She aspires to be the Completely Competent Mother. The archetype of the CCM is an Oxbridge graduate who has given up her career to focus on her children. If the mother of boys, she is coolly confident of having got her son into a top boys’ prep because she had the foresight to think about this before he was born. Consequently he has been in a preprep from the age of 4 and has been schooled in the necessary tests from the moment he began to read and write. If the mother of girls, she is equally confident of having got her daughter into a top girls’ school, be it state or private. It follows that all her children will enter the university of their choice, to study the subject of their choice. Failure does not exist in her lexicon: she is the CEO of a top-performing family and she has bred, groomed and educated her children to succeed. She slightly pities the other mothers; to be honest, she can’t quite understand what they are making so much fuss about.

Next is the Upwardly Mobile Mother. She wants her children to achieve more than she did and is relentless in pursuit of this cause. When they are at primary school she signs them up for every after school activity going, from gymnastics and karate to music and Mandarin; at secondary school she works ceaselessly on their behalf, visiting museums for source material for their projects, chatting up the head at every opportunity and networking like mad with the other parents to secure the right work-experience placement. She will do almost anything to ensure the best outcome for her children and was pilloried wonderfully in John O’Farrell’s novel May Contain Nuts, a pitiless satire on the lengths to which middle-class parents will go to get their child into the right school. At her lowest moments the UMM works herself, and her child, into a frenzy of fear – there are several tales of mothers, and children, vomiting before, and even during, exams.

Finally, there is the Unprepared Mother.

She is the one who realises too late, during a chance and depressing encounter with Completely Competent Mother, that it was at best complacent and at worst utterly pointless to have entered her daughter for the 11-plus without having first provided 12 months’ intensive one-on-one tutoring. It is she who, when Upwardly Mobile Mother demands her opinion on the merits of X school’s science teaching versus that of Y school, realises that she has no opinion, for the simple reason that it has never occurred to her to think about it. She has, instead, been consumed with the fear that her child won’t get into any of the chosen schools: of course not the end of the world, because obviously they will still go to school somewhere – but how will they cope with that rejection? And – crucially – how will she cope?

I know of women who have become seriously ill with the stress of the 11-plus and Year 6 entrance exams, not to mention GCSEs. At best they have a month of worry and sleepless nights; at worst they have a nervous breakdown. And in the end, the question has to be asked, what are we doing it for? Whose interests do we really have at heart?

In January every mother should perhaps set herself the task of reading again the words of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet on the subject of children: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth./ The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

“Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness/ For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

Because what all mothers want is to be the best mother of all: the one who provides them with a secure and happy home, the one who fuels their thirst for learning without becoming obsessed by it, the one who tells them always that their best is good enough, and the one who ultimately lets them go to become whoever and whatever they want to be.

Along the way we will make mistakes and invite pity or ridicule or both.

Our progress is every bit as turbulent as that of the FTSE index this week. But the majority of us will survive it all – not despite, but because of, the one thing on which we are clear: our children are the investment that really matters.

Bitchiness barrier

An American academic argues that boys at primary school tend not to flourish in co-educational classes because their brains develop more slowly, they are naturally more physical and they do not hear as clearly as girls. In Florida, an experiment to teach the sexes in separate classrooms has seen pass rates for boys in fourth grade (Year Three here) rise from 55 per cent to 85 per cent. So far, so good (and another reason for Completely Competent Mother to congratulate herself – see left). But what of the effects of single-sex education on girls? A new book by Val Besag, an educational psychologist, says that girl-on-girl bullying is far more damaging than the ways in which boys intimidate each other, while Vicky Tuck, the head of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, has said that bitchy behaviour is “women’s last barrier to triumph in the workplace” and that schools have a duty to eradicate it.

Purely anecdotal evidence suggests that girls are far bitchier in all-girl schools than in a coed environment, where bitchiness tends to be ameliorated by the presence of boys.

But of course Vicky Tuck is right. There is no deadlier enemy for a woman in the workplace than another woman bent on her destruction, especially if the latter has a senior male in whose ear to drip her carefully modulated poison. As men on the whole are both less manipulative and more innocent, he will tend to believe her – and when her victim complains, she will be dismissed with a tutting sound and an admonishment not to be so unsisterly. Genius!

Lighten up, luvvies

Glancing through the list of Oscar nominations, I see there is plenty of blood, violence and despair but very little fun. Is it too much to ask, with a recession looming, for Hollywood to turn its creative might towards some comedy? Along with rediscovering the joys of thrift and English seaside holidays, it would be comforting to think that at least we could have a laugh, too.

Times Recommends

• Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers
• Dave’n’George: there may be trouble ahead
• I do not accept that £64,000 a year for politicians is peanuts