So she has a choice: she either goes to the office, or she breastfeeds. She should choose the former, because it will be a whole lot better for everyone concerned. For the last few decades there have been marvellous things called bottles and infant formula.

I couldn’t possibly have known that your parents are that age, given that you speak as though you have very young children. Mine were in their late 40s. But I know plenty of grandparents who were older than that and delighted to look after their grandchildren. Not everybody sees children as the burden you do.

You’re a man. You don’t have much access to mothers of young children except for your own. And yes, they plague their children, relentlessly. Today’s Maltese mothers have redefined the term ‘helicopter mother’.

You are not in a position to know how I raised my children, but as they say, the proof of the pudding and so on.

I see from your last paragraph that the real reason you don’t want to let your children’s grandparents look after them is because you don’t trust them. You suspect that they will “let nature take its course”.

And that phrase tells me that you are one of those parents I can’t stand who sees their children as a project to be managed.

Let them be. With children the same rule applies as to all else – you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. If they were born thick, no amount of homework, private tuition or flash cards are going to make them intelligent.

You forget that I have far more experience in child-rearing than you do. I’ve raised mine and they’re off, and you haven’t even started and yet seek to give me lessons.

Truly incredible – I believe your poor wife must be sorely tested. No wonder she is desperate to get back to the office.

It effectively becomes a nightmare in which the woman finds herself spinning in circles to do everything while also dealing with sulks, resentment, passive aggressiveness and cooperation only under extreme duress. When she finds herself thanking him for carrying out an errand, or feeling surprised and grateful because he has noticed that there are wet clothes in the washing-machine and has taken them out (but not hung them up to dry), she knows that something is seriously skewed and that it is NOT going to get better.

In that situation, the woman has some very real choices to make, and none of them are pretty: give up her work, give up her husband or give up on her husband and carry on working under stress in those conditions which he creates deliberately, because she is damned if she is going to give in and knows that she is also damned if she gives up and has to rely on him exclusively financially.

Lovely Tea Party is a man. If his wife decides to work, she is going to have a really hard time with him. You can tell by his attitude already.

You are a little confused about this.

If upbringing is calculated on the number of hours spent with a parent, then most of the fathers of the children of my generation will be said to have played almost no part in their children’s upbringing at all.

But they did. You can even say they played most of the part because they were the ones who laid down the law.

Most children are at school for seven hours a day. Does the school bring them up? No. Does that mean nobody is bringing them up? No.

You have on on-going problem with working mothers and I remember that when I first read your remarks in this regard, I assumed from your tone that you are a woman who doesn’t want to work.

But you are a man with a wife and children. Does she want to work – is that the problem here?

The solution is for your wife to find a job which fits with school hours (unless you wish to do that yourself so that she can get a full-time job) and have your parents do the rest. I assume you have four parents between you, at least two of whom will almost certainly he housewives and the other two retired or close to retirement age.

Nor does upbringing equate with helicopter motherhood. That is the way to raise neurotics. My generation was brought up by parents who left us largely to our own devices with occasional pauses to read the Riot Act. We would have absolutely hated having mothers who hovered over us with crafts and other helpful suggestions. That is not to say that we didn’t do anything like that (we did), but we didn’t need or want our mothers to get involved.

Children today are literally plagued by their mothers. They don’t get any breathing space. This is a very recent change, and it is the result of attitudes such as yours, I’m afraid. When you have motherhood down as a vocation, that vocation needs to justify itself with more and more tasks and more and more project management of the child.

If that were the case, then it follows that only qualified full-time professionals would be permitted to have children.

Why do you want a professional qualified in child care to look after your child when you are not a professional qualified in childcare yourself and yet look after him properly?

You just have to be sensible and practical.

Eight hours a day? Children begin nursery school at 18 months – 2. Granted, it’s only until noon, but when you are working part-time until 1pm, that’s a lot of help. Of course, you then have to sort out the holidays, but summer schools are a lot better than they used to be.

Also, two parents of young children generally have four parents of their own between them (and that’s another reason why having children in your late 30s throws everything out of whack – you miss out on the help from grandparents), and surely they can trust their own parents to look after their children.

There is a third option: petition the government to deliver on its child-care-centres promise. Exactly why do you think so many women are able to work in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy and France? They have proper childcare centres.

I don’t really approve of sending babies to childcare centres unless it’s absolutely necessary, and I don’t think women should work long hours when their children are small, either – for their sake as well as the children’s.

But when children are in secondary school and women are still faffing around being “full-time mums” (because they always say ‘full-time mum’, even though nobody Maltese uses the word ‘mum’ to call their mother), then it’s a completely different issue.

At that point, you have to face the fact that they couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of working.

Students are over 16 and do not require constant adult supervision in the way children do. In fact, they are old enough to earn pocket money by working as babysitters themselves.

Children are not left alone – when their mothers work, they are supervised by other adults.

In my experience (observation), children whose mothers work often turn out to be more motivated than children whose mothers don’t work. Others might have different observations, but mine is that non-working mothers, now that times have changed and women are no longer confined to the home which means that it is an actual choice, are the wrong role model especially for daughters.

There are far too many genetic and socio-educational factors involved, but one influential factor could be that a mother who works is a better role model for her children, even sons, than one who doesn’t. A mother who doesn’t work consciously or unconsciously gives her children the idea that work is optional.

Housework and cooking are not full-time work because, as couples who both work will tell you, they get done anyway. They don’t live in filth and go unfed.

So what does that make all fathers then (except those li jghixu bir-relief) – part-time fathers?

Good for you. You are an exception.

I loved being a mother only until my children grew up and became independent.

I loved my job which I had to relinquish on getting married. So I went back to practise my profession. Today I have my own pension .