That is to say, the eradication of “pro-family” policies geared towards encouraging the conception of the two-parent family as the ideal. Which is not to say we want to encourage people to raise children on their own. Quite the opposite, we want to realise that children require a strong network of adults around them apart from the two hypothetical adults in the family. We also need to realise that, for myriad reasons, probably the majority of children will have the hypothetical “ideal” nuclear family disrupted at some stage of their upbringing. (right wingers push “pro family” policies emphasising marriage and frowning on divorce, but also push wars which create widows and orphans, because it’s apparently better to have your father killed in a foreign land than to be able to see him every weekend, for example).

What I’m talking about isn’t any specific economic policy, but rather a complete rethinking of the way we view childrearing in the 20th century, and an eradication of the conservative-religious inspired moralising which pushes policy down narrow and often disastrous pathways, as well as helping to keep the tone of our society set to “disapproval” for every woman who has a child out of wedlock. If we could get parents of young mothers to consider what’s best for the child, rather than some outdated conception of shame and sinfulness that the poor girl has brought on the family, we’d be doing almost infinite good in the working-class areas in Britain and America.

Of course, such a move, being sensible, pro-woman, pro-child, workable and plain common sense will never happen, because “pro-family” interest groups aren’t pro-family at all. If they were, they’d recognise that “it takes a village to raise a child” is more than just idle words, and is far more effective than their own policies even though they don’t support the idea that the final word on what is absolutely right was decided in a desert four thousand years ago by a man with a long beard talking to God up a mountain. Those are the ideas that we have to support in our society, therefore moving away from the emphasis on marriage and towards actually looking after children whatever the circumstances of the parents is hardly likely to happen.

So, sure, let’s talk about breast-feeding and paternal leave.

I am completely in sympathy with reducing poverty and its effects. But I can’t help but think much of this is an excuse for featherbedding the middle classes. What gets me is that most of the proposals seem to miss the poor, but would be very handy for a pair of middle class parents in full-time jobs. I think the focus on employment in particular is great for middle class, but the people with real problems – the unemployed – seem to be ignored.

Perhaps I’m just a bastard, but ensuring the wellbeing of middle class children doesn’t really strike me as a priority. So perhaps I’m advocating something that should be off the agenda. I’m fine with cheap gestures like banning junk food advertising, but my challenge would be to persuade me this isn’t just about expensive perks for people who are comparatively well off.

But as pressure to breast-feed increases, a two-class system is emerging for working mothers. For those with autonomy in their jobs — generally, well-paid professionals — breast-feeding, and the pumping it requires, is a matter of choice. It is usually an inconvenience, and it may be an embarrassing comedy of manners, involving leaky bottles tucked into briefcases and brown paper bags in the office refrigerator. But for lower-income mothers — including many who work in restaurants, factories, call centers and the military — pumping at work is close to impossible, causing many women to decline to breast-feed at all, and others to quit after a short time.

It is a particularly literal case of how well-being tends to beget further well-being, and disadvantage tends to create disadvantage — passed down in a mother’s milk, or lack thereof.

I’m rather surprised that you should come into this thread swinging accusations of cluelessness around as you have – these aren’t “academic” policies but serious issues for working class women (and more so than for middle class or professional women, because the former don’t have as much bargaining power). They intersect with class and poverty in some very important and complicated ways.

Yes, but poor parents have big families, vertically and horizontally; care is shared, or at least it was in my corner of the gutter back in the early 50s. And then neglect was no big deal. We’ve lost that.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem if it was only a matter of bread or cake, but it is in fact more of a question of bread or no bread. Rich parents may neglect their children too, but poor parents are forced to.

On another tack, isn’t it possible to argue that there are certain thresholds (not developing rickets, being literate, having shoes etc.) which we should, as a society, attempt to make possible for as many individual children as possible to reach? Furthermore, mightn’t other individual and societal benefits be dependent on as many children as possible reaching those thresholds? (E.g. the fewer illiterate, malnourished, angry children there are, the fewer anti-social, violent, Republican-voting adults there will be in the future.)

Of course, I support leveling actions too, but in the context of a discussion about social reforms rather than social revolution, I don’t think it is essential that all proposals result in some kind of objective class leveling.

I am not claiming that women and men should always bear equal costs of their procreative decisions; I am only saying that at the moment women bear already a very large cost of childrearing, if child policies increase the burdens of childrearing on parents, we should not shift all these additional burdens onto women, precisely because they already are carying an unequal burden. There is a real risk of increasing gender inequality if we discuss child well-being policies in a gender neutral way; and that I wish to avoid. Of course, this leaves many things open, such as what gender inequality is, but the main point is to have it as part of the debate.

Qualification: the only case of parenting were you might argue that all things considered, men systematically lose out, in my view, is upon divorce (again, this depends on the legal practice in the different countries, but there are a number of countries where motherhood ideologies not only give mothers disproportionate shares of costs of raising children, but also give them whatever they ask in terms of custody when they divorce. But this surely needs another post, some other day).