It’s always a challenge to balance professional and personal responsibilities, no matter your gender or nationality. The 2022 Autumn of Cough was not just a US phenomenon. But the American mother is always, at any given moment, doing the wrong thing — and, at least in theory, being shamed for it. American motherhood literature emerges, then, from that situation.

An earlier microgeneration of American moms had to contend with parenting advice. Books that explained whether you could drink a glass of wine while pregnant, or how to get your children to eat vegetables. (The answer in all matters was: be like the French.) Today’s reading material, growing out of the lockdown and school closure era as it does, is more nihilistic. The message is: it’s not your fault; everything is systemic. A portrait begins to emerge, in contemporary American mom-lit, of a mother who, rather than taking small steps to ease her suffering, wants to use her own struggles as a starting point to highlight still-greater ones. She’s not a sassy bad mom, but if she moms badly, it is because the system has (and it has!) set her up for failure.

This year, for instance, we have had New York Times parenting journalist Jessica Grose’s book Screaming on the Inside: a well-reported, head-on attack on American mothers’ struggles, which are structural, and worse for the marginalised. We have had, too, the science journalist Chelsea Conaboy’s Mother Brain, which takes a more roundabout approach. Here, too, everything is structural, everything is impossible, but extra impossible if you don’t happen to be straight or white. Arguing contrary to conventional wisdom, Conaboy’s conclusion is that being a mom (or a dad, or a non-binary parent; she doesn’t exclude) can actually make you a better worker.

These books — like the various articles, posts and newsletters making similar cases — are written not, of course, by mothers generally. They are written by a subset of American women who happen to be both writers and mothers, and who apply the liberal critiques common to the world of mainstream journalism to the intractable problem that is American motherhood. They speak to an audience of women who agree with them, but who are too resigned, too exhausted, or privately too convinced the American way is the only valid one, to materially shake things up.

And they, the writers of American motherhood-crisis lit, have a way of blurring material challenges with ambient (and at times imagined) social pressures. Health care bureaucracy and the absence of paid leave, which the writers I mention point out repeatedly, are facts. The requirement to wake up at 4am to bake “dinosaur-shaped muffins that taste like rainbows but are made of steamed arugula” is the stuff of satire but not an actual demand. The suburban writer who recounted, in the New York Times, that “pulling up with the stroller in anything besides smudged black leggings would earn me glares from other moms” at her local play area was reporting on a vibe, not a reality. Who’s to say that if she’d shown up in couture anyone would have cared?

This blurring is an issue because such nebulous plights seem to weigh more heavily on the well-off, but get wrapped up with the ones that operate the way usual plights do, namely by primarily harming have-nots. Grose acknowledges her class privilege, not in a handwringing sense but in a matter-of-fact way, noting that her experience of being able to leave a job without another lined up while pregnant related to her husband’s income. She mentions her mother being a psychiatrist, a plus when she’s having her own struggles with mental health.

The trouble with privilege disclaimers is that they inevitably go on to be about how things are that much worse for those without the same advantages. But are they always? When it comes to things like getting to spend the vomiting phases of pregnancy at home, money helps. Yet some of what Grose describes regarding the pressures to be a “supermom” are specific to the sort of milieu where families have the extra bandwidth to worry about such things. A highly stratified society might be the source of both woes, but it’s unclear whether a year of guaranteed mat leave would impact the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses of school pick-up.

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That is not to say that social pressure on moms isn’t a real thing, or a bad one — or one that purely affects middle-class women. Mothers across the socioeconomic spectrum doubtless feel insecure when they look at those influencer accounts where the flawless-looking mom, surrounded by five perfect angels, holds forth about being #blessed. That is, after all, the business model — you feel bad about your own inadequate life, so you buy whatever it is their sponsored posts are selling.

Grose speaks of algorithms as foisting images of maternal perfection upon unsuspecting women, who then feel they have no choice but to scroll their feeds or even watch their television shows. One sees this a lot in even the best commentary about momfluencers: this idea that you can be minding your own business when suddenly, a white woman with a centre part and beachy waves appears before you, selling you special handbags for “busy moms”, or judging you for your own children’s refusal to try even a small amount of bell pepper. Momfluencers, though, are entirely avoidable, in a way that needing to be in a work meeting and at your child’s doctor’s appointment at the same time is not.

Is there something in the American national character that encourages perfectionism? Something in the baseline impossible situation of American motherhood that promotes aiming higher still? Is the supermom concept just a natural next step, once everyone’s striving in vain regardless? And does all of this idealism serve to obscure the unassailable material facts that no woman can wriggle out of? “Why,” asks Conaboy, “does the United States still lack [a paid maternity leave] policy, more than a century after mothers here formally began lobbying for one?” Her answer is, in part, that “the belief in maternal instinct and biology as destiny — women hold the capacity to care for children, their highest and best use — plus the absolute primacy of the maternal-infant bond”.

Her answer to this is that we must challenge the idea that biology is destiny. She objects that if “the entire infrastructure of mainstream online and in-person support groups is exclusive to birthing, cisgender women, then not only are we telling other birthing parents that they are on their own but we’re sending a message to fathers and partners that this stuff just isn’t really for you”. It’s an interesting idea, but the problem in the States seems more that the people who personally, physically, have babies — the overwhelming majority of whom identify as women — are treated as biologically inconvenient. Easier to just hire a man.

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I was pregnant with my second child during Covid, and expectant fathers, or non-birthing parents otherwise identified, were not allowed to attend obstetrician appointments. This was unpleasant but understandable in the context of an inherently unequal role distribution. The reason the expression “we’re pregnant” grates — and it does — is that only the mother-to-be is avoiding sushi, not that she wants it anyway what with her morning sickness. She’s the one going through ten different dress sizes in the course of a year, and needing sensitive parts of her body stitched back together. Gender identity discourse can serve as a distraction from the material questions of how a society deals with the practicalities of perpetuating the species. And Americans seem uniquely incapable of sensibly dealing with this fact of life.

A culture that actually venerated “the absolute primacy of the maternal-infant bond”, as Conaboy says America does, would prioritise giving new moms a year home with the baby. By not offering paid maternity leave, the US effectively asks new mothers whether they want to have careers or whether they want to be present for the first months of their baby’s life. Are you going to be a businesswoman or a trad wife?

Another way is possible. In Toronto, where I moved in 2015, after growing up and spending most of my 20s in New York City, it’s normal for even the most ambitious women to take a year off work after having a baby. The women one meets at library baby time — and it is almost only women at these — are not, as a rule, stay-at-home moms. This state of affairs exists not because Canadians are somehow more enlightened than Americans about gender essentialism but because of a 1981 postal worker strike. But for whichever mix of cultural and political reasons, American mothers bemoan the status quo, without being empowered to change it.

There’s something bleak about Conaboy’s insistence, central to her book, that contrary to popular belief, being a mom actually makes you a better worker bee. All this scientific backup for the much-repeated pleas about how moms are pros at multitasking — to what end? American employers view having a child as an inconvenient lifestyle choice that they have no obligation to accommodate. Imagine going to the American boss who has groaned when you’ve shared your good news and saying, look, studies show that my brain will be sharper than ever when I get back, see you in a year! Although when you’re in that situation, your choice of words could not matter less.

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American motherhood lit can at times be hazy about what’s specific to the US and what’s a broader facet of having children in the modern world. Even in countries with superior paid-leave policies, employers whinge when expecting mothers announce what’s coming. There are mothers all over the world who find themselves effectively shut out of the workforce because childcare is too expensive. And the existence of paternity leave doesn’t prevent the arrival of a baby from changing the gender dynamics in a hetero household. Some of this is just, life has its challenges, and no particular policy shift, in any direction, would make things otherwise.

And yet. The solutions to the American motherhood crisis are mundane: maternity leave obviously, socialised medicine indirectly, and maybe reduce the chance of school shooting by not effectively handing out guns to anyone who so much as ponders getting one. All of this could transpire without any sort of communist revolution. There could still be fast fashion and plastic toys and food colouring.

But US exceptionalism is a powerful drug. To change what is at this point the American way might mean accepting that other places sometimes — no, not always, but sometimes — do in fact, objectively, have the right idea.

Even if Galip’s funds do dry up, there’s good news for Kristina: a million rubles might be coming her way shortly. President Vladimir Putin recently announced that he would reinstate the Soviet-era Mother Heroine award, which bestows a lump sum to any Russian mother upon her tenth child’s first birthday. It’s not clear whether Kristina will be eligible for another million rubles when her 20th child reaches the age of one, nor is it certain that hers is the kind of motherhood Putin wants to encourage. After all, she has left Mother Russia and married a Turk: she is not boosting the Russian birth rate.

Is it any wonder pro-natalism does not have a good reputation in the West right now? Urgently necessary though some of us believe it to be, the need for more children is a subject which polite politicians and pundits in most democracies steer clear of, leaving the field to autocrats such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. But unless politicians — whether on the Left or Right — reclaim pro-natalism, they might doom their societies.

This ought to be particularly easy for the Left, which has a rich tradition of pro-natalism. Marx made a nemesis of the Reverend Malthus, who suggested that there was a natural limit to population, and unless humans controlled their fertility, they would live predominantly in penury and misery. This philosophy led many of Malthus’s followers — some of whom became prominent administrators of Empire — to shrug indifferently at both famine in Ireland and India and hunger at home. Marx and Engels launched fearsome attacks; to them, Malthus was a “lackey of the bourgeoisie” and his philosophy “a libel on the human race”. Misery was not the result of the proletariat breeding but of the elite exploiting them. In the socialist nirvana, once the exploitative land-owning class had been removed, there would be population expansion and plenty for all.

True, the communist autocrats of the 20th century went too far in their pursuit of this nirvana. Stalin, too, believed that “the most precious capital, the most decisive capital is human beings”. While this did not prevent him and his regime from snuffing out millions of such beings, they were eager for their creation too, and disseminated posters of large happy families of proletarians. Soviet womanhood was lauded for its procreativity as well as its labour, and the Mother Heroine award — the one revived by Putin — continued in the USSR into the days of Gorbachev. Mao, meanwhile, was consistently pro-natalist, despite efforts from those below him to keep China’s population in check: “It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production.”

Today, China has pledged to make fertility treatment more available, while also cracking down on abortion, over concerns about birth rates. Meanwhile, in Cuba, the arrival of Castro was accompanied by a baby boom, in part due to restrictions on abortion. These have long been phased out and Cuba has a very low fertility rate. But the regime in Havana still offers lower tax rates to those with children.

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In short, it’s understandable that pro-natalist policies have become associated with autocracy. Obviously, today’s progressives are better off disavowing Stalin, Mao and Castro. But disavowing pro-natalist policies in general is short-sighted. When I suggested last month that the British government could restructure the tax system to incentivise families to have children, I was met with howls of horror by the progressive crowd and suggestions that I must be somewhere to the Right of Attila the Hun. But while amending the tax system to encourage childbearing and acknowledge its costs seems out of bounds to the Left, it was a Labour government in 1946 which first introduced such a concept into the benefits system, in the form of family allowance.

Today, childbearing has emphatically ceased to be a Leftist cause. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, the understandably distressing news that Roe vs Wade had been overturned in the US was met with a barrage of anti-natalism. The Guardian, for instance, published testimonies by women who bitterly regretted getting pregnant, including those based in nations where abortion rights are not threatened. “Getting pregnant was the worst thing that could have happened to me,” said one interviewee in Mexico. “I hate my reality, the life I didn’t chose,” said a Spanish mother, while another from Germany said: “If I could start over again, I wouldn’t have had any of my children.” It is not that we should never hear such voices, it is simply that their elevation has somewhat precluded the Left’s potential to make a positive case for the continuation of humanity.

There is solid evidence that people in the UK would like on average to have between two and two and half children — but today are having barely one and a half. This is surely an opportunity for Labour to appeal to an electorate of instinctively pro-natal millennials whose circumstances are frustrating them from having larger families.

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What of the Right? For all the policy ground covered in the long Tory leadership race, little has been said on the subject. Liz Truss has suggested tax changes to make it easier for one parent to stay at home, which, worthy or not, is not designed to boost the birth rate. In other words, the Right, too, is failing aspiring parents — and the Left would do well to capitalise on this failure.

For inspiration, Keir Starmer might look to Sweden, a socially liberal nation that touts the second-highest birth rate in Europe. Since the start of the century, the average Swedish woman has around half a child more than the average woman in Greece, a socially conservative nation that has the second-lowest birth rate in Europe. A clue as to why this might be lies in the fact that, when it comes to women’s rights, Sweden and Greece are once again at opposite ends of a European spectrum. Well over 60% of Swedish women participate in the workplace, but only 43% of Greek women do.

In some ways, this is counterintuitive. You might think that where women are staying at home, they are staying at home to take care of children, and that when they are pursuing careers, they are doing so at the expense of having babies. But nothing could be further from the truth. The best way to persuade women who have been given equal rights to bear the next generation is to give them opportunities to partake of those rights in the labour market. This requires finding creative ways — whether through the agency of government or employers or both — of combining work and family. In Sweden, childcare is subsidised and parental leave exceptionally generous.

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This is not just a question of Sweden and Greece; they are merely exemplars of a much wider trend. In countries where female participation in the labour force is low, from Portugal to Japan, so too is the fertility rate. This leaves us in a quandary. Where the progressives set the cultural agenda in places like the UK, any advocacy of motherhood is met with anger and scorn. Where conservative values prevail, in places like Greece and Japan, the limitation of a woman’s right to combine family and career depresses the birth rate.

Despite Putin and Orbán, the time has come to proclaim a new, liberal pro-natalism: one that empowers women and men to have the children the evidence proves they want, allows them to combine parenthood with a career, and which acknowledges that, however the family is defined and redefined in the 21st century, a philosophy which places the individual at the centre cannot exists without individuals.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that I reached adolescence already angry about sexism, and was barely into my teens when I discovered Simone de Beauvoir. In The Second Sex, she argued that men systematically oppress women by characterising them as the Other — that is, as whatever men don’t want to be. “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” she claimed. That is, while male and female humans have different biology, what oppresses women is the way those differences have been exaggerated and turned into a way of denying us our full humanity.

As a teenager, seeing my mum defined as the Other (specifically, “the one whose job it is to do the washing up”), de Beauvoir’s writing spoke to me. I felt as though I and my mum should both have equal standing with my dad and brothers, that we weren’t really that different, but that a noxious set of assumptions and stereotypes had already started shoving me into a different box. And being in that box automatically made me second-best.

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Growing older, I tried to make sense of the relationship of those stereotypes to actual people. Because there’s no denying that the stereotypes themselves have a basis in fact. Numerous well-replicated and cross-cultural studies have shown that, as Scientific American put it in a 2019 article:

“On average, males tend to be more dominant, assertive, risk-prone, thrill-seeking, tough-minded, emotionally stable, utilitarian, and open to abstract ideas. […] In contrast, females, on average, tend to be more sociable, sensitive, warm, compassionate, polite, anxious, self-doubting, and more open to aesthetics.”

Research in this area is generally careful to emphasise that these traits are descriptive, not prescriptive. There are lots of competitive, risk-taking, abstract-thinking women, just as there are cooperative, egalitarian and aesthetically-oriented men. But the evidence does suggest that “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” stereotypes are, on average, borne out. Does that mean, though, that de Beauvoir was wrong and this is all just biology? Are women just naturally better at washing dishes and looking after babies?

Team Nature invites us to believe that sex-linked personality differences evolved over the development of the human species for survival reasons. The field of evolutionary psychology itself is complex and full of live debates, but the pop-science version of this perspective is well understood. Men, we’re told, have evolved for fighting, hunting, and competing with one another to attract as many females as possible, so as to spread their genes around. In contrast, women are less aggressive, while the greater physical cost to women of gestation and child-rearing means we’ve evolved to place more emphasis on commitment in relationships.

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These differences are the stock-in-trade of art and literature — think of Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, or Byron’s Don Juan. But if Team Nature maintains that Don Juan’s philandering is really an evolved drive to maximise his reproductive fitness, Team Nurture insists that what matters in the dynamic between Lydia and Mr Wickham is the sex-linked disparity in their socio-economic situations and upbringings.

Were Lydia not compelled by the unfair social expectations of her day to spend all her time trying to get married, who knows what she might have achieved? Others on Team Nurture argue that if we could only stop treating male and female children differently — buying them colour-coded toys, rewarding boys’ boisterousness and girls’ compliance and so on — then sexism would just fade away.

From this perspective, arguments for a biological basis to sex differences look suspiciously like patriarchy in a lab-coat. A 2017 Pew survey found men more likely than women to ascribe sex differences to biology than women. Perhaps it’s no surprise: after all, it’s only a few steps from citing papers that suggest women have evolved to be more nurturing than men to suggesting this means women are naturally better-suited to doing all the washing up, a convenient viewpoint if you’re not a woman.

And indeed, in the dating battleground, a variant of the ‘nature’ narrative often serves to excuse ‘hard-wired’ male promiscuity. Tabloids report studies suggesting that smiling evolved as a means of getting laid, while articles about dating are full of concepts borrowed from evolutionary psychology. And the concept of ‘hypergamy’ — the notion that women have evolved to prefer partners with resources and status – has migrated from peer-reviewed journals to the ‘manosphere’, where it’s become a bleak narrative of biologically-determined sexual despair for low-status males.

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So the bien-pensant world of egalitarianism is Team Nurture, while incels, tabloids and dating columnists are Team Nature. Of course the reality is a bit of both; it should be clear by now that it’s not really possible to separate ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. And the models themselves are both shaped by, and in turn help to shape our cultures: Incels have built a worldview around the “males compete, women choose” model of human mate selection, but some scientists argue that evolutionary psychology itself exaggerates how far apart men and women are.

There’s also evidence that not only do men and women in egalitarian countries see themselves as more different than in more sexist ones, but when they’re asked to think about it, they exaggerate these differences. A study showed that if you test men and women on how they view themselves unconsciously, sex-linked differences are still greater in egalitarian countries — but the gap between the sexes is smaller. That is, if you ask men and women in egalitarian countries how they see themselves, they’ll overstate stereotypically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits compared with the way they see themselves unconsciously.

On one level, this is a win for Team Nurture. After all, if sex-based personality differences were all down to our biology, they’d be consistent worldwide. As they vary in strength across cultures, we have to conclude our personalities aren’t wholly (or even mainly) determined by biology.

But if the differences are starker in egalitarian countries, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that over half a century of full-frontal liberal-feminist assault on sex role stereotypes has had less than zero effect. Even as we make ever more concerted efforts to purge sex role stereotypes from our public discourse, people’s identification with these stereotypes has grown more, not less, pronounced. So why, and how, could we have ended up amplifying sex-based differences (biological or cultural) in the course of trying to abolish them?

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One study’s authors suggest that developed, egalitarian societies may simply offer men and women more freedom to be themselves. And if there is some biological element to the differences between men and women, then it will form part of the ‘selves’ we’re all now encouraged to ‘be’. Tell the whole population to ‘be yourself’, then, and we’ll all end up leaning into personality differences split ever more sharply along sex-based lines. Paradoxically, then, even frustratingly sexist phenomena such as the pinkification of girlhood arguably owe a debt to the modern emphasis on self-expression.

This poses an intriguing dilemma for feminism: if we could stamp out sexist stereotypes by forcing men and women to act against their inclinations, would that be worth it? I doubt there’s a feminist alive who’d want to make that case explicitly. And yet the well-meaning effort to shift everything into the realm of Nurture ends up doing just that.

Because while sex-based personality differences are real, and probably have some basis in biology, most of them really aren’t that significant in the modern world. Who cares about bodies evolved for fighting and hard labour, in a peaceful and highly industrialised society where manual jobs are now in the minority? No wonder women in the UK now earn as much as or more than men with the same age and qualification.

But when it comes to sex-based differences, there’s not so much an elephant in the room as an elephant in the womb. We may all be mostly roleplaying sex differences to start with, but in one respect the difference between men and women is irreducible. Women under 30 are cleaning up in the career stakes, but when we have kids — now on average around 30.6 years old — that reverses with a vengeance — for reasons that can’t be wholly equalised away by technology. Males can’t gestate, and nor can they breastfeed; it’s no coincidence that only 2% of parents have taken advantage of shared parental leave.

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This in turn drives a specialisation in families that’s hard to shift later on even if you want to: as Sally Howard recounts in The Home Stretch, with the most egalitarian will in the world having kids is often the trigger for a divergence of roles in even a previously egalitarian partnership. And families may not even want to equalise roles again: the sociologist Catherine Hakim has argued that longitudinal data show only around 20% of women prioritise career over family, with by far the majority preferring a mix. The numbers bear this out: ONS data show that even in families with children up to the age of 12 mothers are more likely to work part-time.

And yet policy efforts to address ‘women’s issues’ usual boil down to throwing more subsidies at getting women into the workplace. It’s as though the obvious inclination many women have to spend at least some time with our kids — even if that’s to the detriment of time spent at work — is a flaw to be remedied. And the benchmark against which we’re found wanting here, even by those supposedly advocating for sex equality, is men.

So it turns out we have it all backwards. In an effort to liberate everyone from oppressive sex role stereotypes, we’ve ended up with a culture of self-expression that exaggerates minor sex-linked differences in personality. In trying to free women from our biology, we’ve ended up encouraging everyone to roleplay cartoon gender roles. Meanwhile, for equally well-meaning reasons, we’re downplaying those sex-based differences in interests, priorities and preferences that are still real and irreducible — especially as they relate to motherhood.

In the process we’ve ended up with a vision of ‘equality’ that measures women on the same yardstick as men, even after we have kids, and tells us we’re letting the side down if we demur. Forget ‘pinkification’. The women’s movement must be franker about the only way women really are irreducibly different to men: motherhood.

The bad news is it takes some getting used to. The good news is that if you feel infuriated by your spouse, in despair at what to do with the kids or overwhelmed by trying to manage everything, you are not uniquely hopeless and nor is your family unusually dysfunctional.

When my husband and I started down the homeworking path, we found it much less idyllic than expected. In fact we very nearly split up – even without the added stress of coronavirus worries. But we worked it out. Today, it would take a lot to coax me back to an office job.

Thanks to coronavirus, millions of office-based workers suddenly find themselves in something like our situation. Like everyone else, I hope the pandemic passes soon and we can all go back to normal. But meanwhile, as the nation locks down, here are some things I learned about having home, family and workplace all in the same place without going mad or getting divorced.

Get dressed

If you work outside the home, having to go out in public is motivation to stay presentable. Working from home, the temptation is to treat every day like a weekend, bumbling about in your pyjamas with birds-nest hair. But stay at home mums learn quickly that being clean and presentable – even when you don’t have to – is key to feeling like a normal human being, as well as to that crucial sense of being (at least some of the time) one step ahead of your children.

The same goes for home workers – which is now, suddenly, a lot of us. These are strange and upsetting times. You have just lost most of the structures that define ‘normal’, for an indefinite duration. If you let personal hygiene go as well, you will feel like you are losing the plot. Obviously you don’t have to put on a suit, but you will feel much more yourself if you have a shower and put daytime clothes on first thing. (It also makes short notice videoconferences less stressful.)

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Have a routine

Usually, people have school or office hours to give shape to their daily lives. When I started my stint as a stay at home mum, I tried doing away with all such structures. Egged on by the nocturnal food needs of a new baby, I found myself keeping increasingly strange hours. But once the fog lifted, I realised that even with no one forcing me into a daily routine, I still needed to give my days some shape.

Your office may have shut down, but your body clock has not, and nor have your kids’ body clocks. Get up and go to bed at the same time every day, and stick to regular meals. Life is weird enough right now without giving yourself jetlag as well.

Randomness also wastes energy. You are now in charge of your own daily structure, and your kids’ structure too. If you have to negotiate everything from first principles you will have no bandwidth left for anything more interesting than nagging. The more you can turn into habit, the easier it is to get mundane stuff done and still have energy for more interesting activities.

Everyone cleans and tidies every day

Most families with two working parents get by in domestic terms with a weekend effort or a weekly cleaner. I am here to tell you that is no longer enough. The difference in mess, dust and general grottiness between a family out at work or school every day, and at home all the time, is more than a weekly blitz can cope with.

This matters, because your home is now your workspace and the more of a midden it is the more miserable you will feel. The good news, though, is that you now have time. Hardly anyone really does more than five hours of productive work a day, even if they are at their desk for double that time. You no longer have to look busy in front of colleagues, so between that and your now very short commute, you just gained maybe four hours of daily free time.

When work hits a lull, use some of that time to clean the house. In my experience half an hour a day is enough to keep things under control.Getting up, moving about and watching squalor turn into order is also useful thinking time after a burst of work, not to mention better for your mental health than obsessively refreshing the coronapanic on Twitter.

Make a conscious effort to set cleaning time aside, set a timer, get the kids involved. If you find yourself just moving piles of stuff from one surface to another and prodding around with a duster without ever seeing an improvement, The Organised Mum has a brilliant system that will help you get a grip.

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Split the shift

I take my hat off to all the single parents figuring out how to navigate home working with kids present. If you live with a partner, though, I recommend you split the shift. In our household, I like waking and working early, while my husband is more productive later in the day. So while schools and childminders are closed he is the childcaring parent until noon (I am usually at my desk by 5am) and I’m on duty after that.

If you do split the shift, try to be clear who is in charge of the kids and step back if it isn’t you. Don’t micromanage if the other parent is in charge. Don’t be Fun Uncle, either: if you wander in from your desk to make a coffee and end up whisking the kids off to play while your in-charge-of-the-kids-right-now spouse sits about like a lemon, they will not see it as ‘helping’. At least, don’t complain if they then leave you with the baby and go off to answer emails.

Dial back expectations

Families that only have evenings and weekends together are more likely to assume ‘quality time’ as the standard. But when you are together 24/7 you cannot keep that up. Especially resist the temptation to be constantly hands-on with the kids. Schools are sending crazy amounts of work out for distance learning but remember they are panicking too. A bit of structure is good (one friend, several weeks into lockdown in Italy, says her kids’ music practice is going great guns) but at least for young children, that structure can be mostly practical tasks and pottering about. A few weeks of Lego and helping with housework interspersed with the odd worksheet will do no harm.

As my husband and I discovered when we moved to home-working, being around your spouse 24/7 also means dialling back the intensity of your relationship and respecting each other’s headspace. If you spring a major worry or decision on your spouse who is deep in work thoughts and just came in for a snack, you are more likely to get a knock-back than the answer you need. A quick check that your other half has enough bandwidth for a chat will spare you many stupid arguments.

We make a point of eating together as a family, and making time for conversation after our daughter is asleep, but otherwise mostly act as if we are both out at work in different locations. We are lucky to have a home office each, but even if your space does not allow that, work in different rooms. If sharing a room is unavoidable, make headphones socially acceptable.

If space is very tight, former submariner Jon Bailey (who ought to know about coping with confinement) recommends timesharing the sitting room so everyone gets an hour or so alone to do as they please.

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By Mary Harrington

Be patient with each other

It takes practice and negotiation to manage sharing space, schedules, chores and childcare alongside work all under a single roof. Be patient with each other.

If you are usually the main caregiver and domestic organiser, you may feel invaded by all these extra bodies in your well-organised space. Try not to radiate resentment or micromanage everyone’s schedules, no matter how tempting it is. (Seriously – this nearly cost me my marriage.)

Conversely, if your spouse is usually in charge of the household, remember he or she has already put thought and effort into systems that make it run smoothly. Don’t insult him or her with your blindness to that achievement. Find out how things work and what tasks you can take on within the existing system. You may think you have a brilliant idea to improve the system, but resist the temptation to hold forth until you understand how everything fits together. Otherwise you will come across like a graduate first-jobber trying to reorganise the entire company and getting sulky when rebuffed.

Make time for meals and exercise

Making time for movement is not a waste of your working day, it is vital to your sanity. Gardening, cleaning, yoga, weights or aerobics  – there are plenty of forms of physical activity compatible with the lockdown measures even if you are self-isolating. Workout apps, YouTube and the internet are your friend for low-equipment exercise ideas suitable for all ages. Likewise, cook proper food and eat together as a family as much as possible – you can go back to ignoring each other companionably in between.

Baking your own bread is easy

On a cheerier final note, baking bread is easy and makes the house smell amazing. If your poncy bakery has closed with the lockdown, this is your opportunity to fine-tune your sourdough technique and irritate everyone on social media with crumb shots. I recommend Ken Forkish’s fantastically nerdy Flour Water Salt Yeast as a foolproof primer for delicious breadmaking. Be warned though: bread is the gateway drug for a weirdly addictive (really!) world of yeast-based hobbies, and you will be brewing your own booze before you know it