Madam, - Mrs Mary Stewart (October 5th) claims that it is "impossible to prove that children do not prefer to be cared for by their parents". Conversely, it must also be acknowledged that it is impossible to prove that children prefer to be cared for by their parents.
Perhaps Mrs Stewart holds that children have some sort of a priori conception of what is best for them. But this is hardly likely. A child raised primarily by professional child-carers will merely have had a different upbringing to a child raised primarily by its stay-at-home mother. Mrs Stewart seems to hold that different necessarily means bad, or worse. It does not.
When faced with these sentiments, what comes very much to my mind is not the communist system, whereby parents were forced to work and children were raised by the State, but rather a different kind of totalitarian regime where women are prevented from achieving their full potential outside the home due to vaguely defined, highly unsatisfactory and wholly outmoded notions of what is "best" for their children.
Does Mrs Stewart seriously mean to imply that a house without a woman chained to the sink is not a home? - Yours, etc,
OWEN CORRIGAN, Trinity College, Dublin 2.
Madam, - Breda O'Brien must be congratulated on her excellent column in last Saturday's edition.
Last year at election time every politician at my door promised "better childcare". I don't want better childcare for my children. As a stay-at-home mother I am the best carer for them. But a bit of financial recognition (like the refundable tax credits) wouldn't go amiss. - Yours, etc,
EMMA PERCIVAL, Dalkey, Co Dublin.