Now Ruth Davidson is to be a mum she might think about the cost of parenting

I listened to a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in about Ruth Davidson’s happy news and the issues faced by couples who want to start a family and both continue working.

Many talked about the stress. Responses ranged from “they should have thought about that in the first place” to “we have no choice, we both need to work to pay the bills”.

Some couples may selfishly want children but keep working in order to continue their lifestyle, but the majority see their marriage or partnership as including children and are prepared to make sacrifices.

This was always the case but now, with the average rent or mortgage on a three-bedroom house at £900 a month, fulltime child care costing £200 a week per child and average take home pay £1,600 a month, one spouse is effectively working to pay the mortgage, and in order to save money grandparents are increasingly involved in childminding.

But many have no relatives nearby, and don’t get long, paid, maternity leave.

Scotland’s future depends on more children born to decent parents, and ideally one of them should be at home before children go to school. The biggest obstacle to that is not just materialism, it is the cost of housing.

I wish Ms Davidson all the best and hope that if she has any spare time she will give a thought to policies that vastly reduce the cost of housing and childcare, including making childcare grants available to parents who prefer to stay at home with their children. This was mooted by Labour several years ago and is the basis of Angela Merkel’s Betreuungsgeld proposals.

ALLAN SUTHERLAND

Willow Row, Stonehaven

Ruth Davidson hopes that her pregnancy will normalise the deliberate production of fatherless children. She implies that kids don’t need a dad, and not a single MSP demurs.

In an age obsessed with children’s rights, their basic need for a mum and a dad is trumped by the desire of adults to form relationships and family structures as they wish.

However, Mum and Dad are not indistinguishable and interchangeable Parent A and Parent B. Male and female role models in the home are important. Despite the best efforts of the liberal sociology establishment to obscure the facts, the manifold negative outcomes associated with same-sex parenting should give cause for concern.

Connection to one’s natural family is a powerful force, and the yearnings of those brought up in the absence of one genetic parent can be overwhelming as a young person matures.

Ms Davidson had planned to commit to her partner in the solemn legal and public pledges of lifelong faithfulness, care and love that constitute marriage, but they decided to pay vets’ bills instead. It seems that her understanding of marriage is more focused on an expensive day than its deep meaning and power to sustain a relationship.

Marriage preceding childbirth is a strong predictor of good outcomes for children. That’s the sort of traditional wisdom that a “Conservative” party might seek to promote. But Ms Davidson’s party is anything but conservative.

Our virtue-signalling political elite are predictably enthusiastic, while condemning as a homophobic bigot anyone claiming that kids should, ideally, have a mum and a dad. “Listening to young people” is a routine refrain in Holyrood, but how does one reply when they say that they really wish that they had had a mum and a dad?

RICHARD LUCAS

Scottish Family Party Bath Street, Glasgow