Secret World of the Working Mother
by Fiona Millar
288pp, Vermilion, £12.99
The See-Saw: 100 Ideas for Work-Life Balance
by Julia Hobsbawm
144pp, Atlantic Books, £6.99
The Idle Parent
by Tom Hodgkinson
320pp, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99
Parentdom is a horribly vivid domain, sickening and strange, like Oz. All three of these books provide glimpses into this Technicolor realm of overwhelming responsibilities and terrifying powerlessness, in which the brave authors scramble and stretch and writhe in agonies trying to make sense of their roles as 21st-century parents.
Fiona Millar's The Secret World is a shocking report on her frantic battle "to try to do justice to my children, my education, my training and ambition". "It is 20 years", she writes, "since I took the plunge and went back to work as a full-time political reporter on a national newspaper, leaving a 12-week-old baby at home with a young, relatively inexperienced nanny." During those 20 years, while working as a journalist and adviser to Cherie Blair, she seems to have tried every kind of precarious childcare arrangement and balancing act, and has worked herself to a frazzle. She admits to being "permanently exhausted" and suffering from pangs of regret, rage and guilt.
She's not alone. Large parts of the book consist of conversations with women facing similar struggles. But for some, the kind of worries and anxieties that Millar describes will seem, frankly, ludicrous or simply incomprehensible. "One nanny fact is irrefutable," she writes. "They can be very expensive. The £30,000 a year charged by some nannies in the south-east of England ... is often expected to be part of a more generous package which can include sole use of a car, self-contained accommodation and expensive foreign holidays." Not surprisingly, Millar urges more flexible working practices and subsidised childcare. "Returning to work shouldn't mean sacrificing time with your children or the wider community." But it does, doesn't it, given the laws of time and space? No one can be in two places at once.
Unless perhaps they're Julia Hobsbawm. Where Millar is ruminative and punishingly self-reflective, Hobsbawm provides a no-nonsense, pull-your-socks-up guide to parenting which combines personal anecdote with case studies and "Top Tips". Again, the case studies might seem a little alien to anyone outside the major metropolitan areas ("Antonia, leader writer at the London Evening Standard and on the Conservative party's candidate list, is a mother of three"), and the top tips are perhaps not always utterly tip-top ("Avoid the Pushy Mum syndrome"; "Try to buy more time for your children rather than objects. An hour of actual attention is emotionally worth thousands of pounds to them"), but The See-Saw is not a book one turns to for profundity of thought. It's about quick-fixes for the parenting merry-go-round. Basically, lighten up, multitask and get on with it.
Tom Hodgkinson, in The Idle Parent, goes much further. He's ultimately a rich hippy, like Thoreau. His book is about how he's solved his parenting problems by packing it all in and going to live in Devon. His parenting motto is "Leave them alone". As for the likes of Millar and Hobsbawm, he exhorts: "Women, take heed! Stop working and start living!" Not that he's advocating a return to motherhood and apple pies. No. What he recommends for women is "Work of her own choosing, that is, independent work, autonomous work, creative work." At his best he sounds like William Morris. At his worst, like Jeremy Clarkson.
Again, some readers - and not just Millar and Hobsbawm - might find Hodgkinson's advice rather difficult to swallow. His laissez-faire, anarcho-Tory approach to parenting is all very well for someone living in rural Devon. On a farm. With an au pair. And a pony. And a lovely rural primary school with just 40 children down the road. And the means to pay for private education when they get older - Hodgkinson is particularly keen on Summerhill and Eton. But for the rest of us? "I can hear," he says, "the programmed liberal voice whingeing that not everybody can afford private school." Stuff and nonsense, says Hodgkinson. The parents of his friends when he was at Westminster School were just your average professionals. You know, "doctors, journalists, architects, actors, writers." And most families, he says, could easily save £10,000 a year "at a stroke" by cutting out luxuries such as mobile phones, holidays and big TVs. A friend, he says, ran a market stall at weekends to pay for school fees. Fees at Eton are currently in the region of £30,000 per year. So that would be some market stall. And some TV. But these blindspots are the quirks of the free spirit: Hodgkinson also advocates skateboarding, ukulele playing, camping and the drinking of beer.
So is there a simple solution to the bewildering challenges and problems of parenting? Millar: the state? Hobsbawm: the self? Hodgkinson: the children themselves? When Glinda arrives to save Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, the lesson learned is this: "The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own back yard." If one learns anything from these books, it's surely that there are no answers, only autobiographies.
• Ian Sansom's The Delegates' Choice is published by Harper Perennial. To order The Secret World of the Working Mother for £11.99, The See-Saw for £6.99 or The Idle Parent for £13.99, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.
