You've got nothing to be guilty of...

Working mothers should wise up. You're helping no-one by feeling guilty, least of all yourself. Kathryn Holmquist thinks it's time for mums to stop being so hard on themselves

For many women, guilt is the after-birth of pregnancy. Almost from the moment their babies are born, a sense of guilt floods in that almost that makes them afraid to put their babies down. We're afraid to let them cry (something they do naturally for up to four hours per day), we're afraid to let them eat the wrong food, watch the wrong TV, play with the wrong toys and, as they get older, we're terrified to let them out of the house.

Women are bombarded with messages about what it means to be a good mother, and for many conscientious women there's a pervading fear that we'll never be good enough.

Why don't fathers feel this way? While six out of 10 Irish mothers feel "great guilt" about working outside the home, only one in 10 fathers feels the same way. Ninety per cent of fathers don't feel "great guilt" about working, yet 60 per cent of mothers do.

What's wrong with this picture? Most working women who are also parents seem to be hard-wired for guilt in a way that most working fathers are not. Working mothers are twice as likely as working fathers to feel excessive stress and to be tired all the time.

Maybe this is a case of why a woman should be more like a man, because where is the guilt getting us? And how does it benefit our children? Guilt is a destructive emotion. It achieves nothing, and erodes a lot.

Working mothers are finding sex unfulfilling. And I don't think it's necessarily because their husbands haven't read up on the latest sex techniques. It's just as likely to be because many working women can't relax and feel constantly under stress.

When I had my first child and wanted to continue with my career and was feeling guilty about it, the best advice I got was from two men. One was from the Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Dublin, known to my family as "Gordon" (Linney), who offered me words to the effect: "Never feel guilty about working. Your children will be grown up sooner than you think, and if you give up work what will you have when your children are gone?" The other was Dr Michael Fitzgerald, a child psychiatrist and researcher, who told me simply: "A happy mother makes a happy baby." In other words, if mother is doing what is good for her, her children will be happy too.

Both these wise men recognised the destructive power of guilt, both in the short and long-term. They also realised that children are resilient.

Children want the best their mother can offer and that doesn't necessarily mean a mother on call 24 hours a day. A happy and fulfilled working mother will give her child more confidence than a mother who is home all day, but depressed and miserable.

The way men think about child-rearing can be more pro-active and positive.

In my early mothering years, a male colleague advised: "Don't think there aren't people who can care for your children just as well as you can". Another friend, a hospital consultant, confided: "You're not indispensable, you know."

I found these last two statements harder to take. After all, wasn't there something special and unique about me as a mother that made me indispensable to my children? Wouldn't my children fade away if deprived of my loving presence? No, actually. One of the most satisfying aspects of being a parent is discovering that your children want and need to form strong bonds with other people. The problem is finding the quality of childcare required to form these attachments, but that's not a guilt issue, that's a public policy issue. Mothers shouldn't feel guilty about the quality of childcare, they should be campaigning to improve it.

AND women are, actually. There are at least 50 childcare initiatives around the State. I'm convinced that nothing will really change until fathers start campaigning. Yet fathers don't feel the same stresses that mothers do.

Men are four times more likely than working mothers to feel relaxed. They are much less likely to feel guilty, perhaps because they are better at compartmentalising. When they're at work, they're working. When one of the 60 per cent of women who feel guilty about working is at work, she's still got the children on her mind. The other 40 per cent of women have wised up.

There's a degree to which this is biological, and a degree to which it's conditioning. If your children are happy and perfectly well looked after, there's no need to worry about them when you're at work. Yet children seem to have a guilt-inducing gene that makes mothers feel bad when they shouldn't.

When my first child was tiny, I recall going out for the evening while she staged a storm-force 10 tantrum at the door. One of the friends I was going out with, who happened to be a psychologist, said: "You do realise that she's only doing this to see your reaction, and that she'll settle down the minute your out the door, don't you?" Rationally, yes, I realised that. Emotionally, it's harder. Children really know how to push your buttons. So why were my emotions threatening to over-ride my rationality? It just doesn't make sense.

My own mother was a working mother. I cannot recall ever feeling, not even once, that she was neglecting me by having a career. To the contrary, I felt pride in her achievements. And I felt sorry for children whose mothers seemed to have nothing better to do than to slice their food in precise portions and iron their clothes with military precision. My mother was a feminist and if it weren't for her - and a whole generation of women like her - I wouldn't be doing what I am now.

I fear that this generation of mothers have forgotten the battles fought by the previous generations. We're buying tickets for the guilt-party as though there was something wrong with mothers working. Women can be horrible to other women in this regard, often unintentionally.

I overheard one child say to another: "You're in after-school care because you're mother doesn't love you." That message is obviously coming from the stay-at-home child's mother, who is justifying her existence and dealing with her jealousy of the working mother by telling her own child that to have a "full-time" mother makes you more loved.

This is nonsense. The stay-at-home mother whose only priority is her children is a notion constructed in the US after the second World War, when it suited the economy to get women out of the factories in order to make jobs for the boys returning from war. It's a fabrication.

Mothers have always worked outside the home - whether it was baking and selling bread, or working in the fields. Wealthy mothers paid other people not only to rear their children, but to nurse them as well.

The good news is that we can do a lot more now than bake bread and pick cotton. So let's celebrate that fact and stop feeling guilty.