Adam Webster, full-time father and part-time Associate Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, argues that the government must rethink how Britain conceives work, care and family life.
As he says in an 'expert comment' issued by the University of Oxford's media people, we have built a world where parents are expected to be simultaneously working and present for family.
It's all good stuff, but I was struck by this sentence:
In the 1950s, 80 per cent of mothers in the UK stayed at home and the school run was part of their domestic routine.
My instinct was that the concept of the school run is more recent than that, and Google Ngram above suggests I'm right. It's use suddenly took off in the late 1990s.
And we didn't have much of a school run avant la lettre. In the 1950s, people tended to live nearer their children's school then fewer of them owned cars. Whether because of this lower level of traffic or because there was less fear of 'strangers', they were more relaxed about letting young children out on their own. So a school child would soon walk to school with friends or older brothers and sisters rather than their mother.
I can certainly recall that in the Sixties you would have died from embarrassment if you had been met from school once you had reached the age of nine.
You can't turn the clock back, but every change has positive and negative consequences.
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