The ‘mom-shamers’ need to let parents decide how they bring up their children

Once, when I lived in America, I left my newborn son in the car for two minutes while I nipped into a restaurant to collect a jacket I’d left behind a few weeks earlier. He’d been screaming, exhausted, for a good 20 minutes prior, and had finally fallen asleep. I reasoned the time it would take me to pop in and out again didn’t warrant waking him.

When I came out again, a couple with a camera were walking up the hill. They were photographing houses, but in my irrational, sleep-deprived post-natal brain, I became convinced they had taken a picture of my car with its happily sleeping babe in order to report me to the police. Hours of Googling what might subsequently happen to me did nothing to allay my fears: it is illegal in 14 US states to leave a child unattended in a vehicle. I spent weeks in terror that the police were about to arrest me at any moment.

Unfortunately I am not alone, for “mom-shaming” is having a bit of a moment. Both in the US and the UK, mothers – and it’s primarily mothers; fathers don’t seem to receive the same disapprobation – are being told that their actions, however carefully the balances of danger versus convenience have been weighed up, are wrong, dangerous and immoral.

In The New York Times last week, Kim Brooks told how, after leaving her child (happily) locked in her car for five minutes, she was reported to the police and eventually compelled to do 100 hours of community service. In the British High Court, Violet Ellis won a 10-year legal battle against insurers of a driver who hit her then eight-year-old child while speeding at twice the legal speed limit beside a designated play zone. They claimed that she had been negligent in allowing her son to play outside without her. Meanwhile, the American socialite Khloé Kardashian received online criticism for spending a single evening at a charity event instead of being with her six-month-old daughter, True.

One reaction to such stories is that we are worrying about the wrong things; that we clearly need to let our children take more risks; to return to unfettered, free-range childhood. But this is not about valuing safety over risk taking, or vice versa. After all, every parent’s attitude to potential dangers is different. Some will happily let their child chop vegetables with a sharp knife, cross the road without holding an adult’s hand at all times or strap their child into a taxi. For others, all those choices will be absolute anathema. The point is, it should be up to parents to evaluate the risks and make their choices accordingly.

British law, unlike America’s, recognises that latitude: it makes it an offence to leave a child alone if it places them at risk, and tells us to use our judgment. But judgment is exactly what is being undermined when mothers are chastised, shamed or indeed arrested for how we choose to look after our children.

Increasingly, private citizens seem to feel licensed to police other citizens on the basis of the briefest glimpse into their life. Allow your child to walk to school alone? You’re an irresponsible carer. Hold their hand all the way until they’re 18? That’s wrong too. As a

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion parent, you can’t win. From how we supervise our children to how we feed them, we are, it seems, no longer allowed to evaluate options ourselves and make decisions as we see fit.

Did you know, for example, that you aren’t allowed to use supermarket vouchers to buy formula milk? Forget the fact that many women simply can’t breastfeed – or even just that they might not want to – such is the power of the breast-is-best brigade that these women are not actually permitted to discount an alternative purchase.

I admit, I tend to side with the breastapo: I think breastfeeding is the optimum choice, if at all possible. But it is a choice. Who knows why that woman with the bottle is feeding her baby that way? Perhaps her medical history means formula is better. Perhaps she’s working three jobs to support her child and can’t schedule breastfeeding. Similarly, that kid asleep in a car may have been there for 20 seconds in full sight of his mother. That over-protective father? Perhaps his child took a tumble last week. You usually don’t know the reasoning behind any of these choices, and they’re probably none of your business.

Of course there remain exceptional circumstances where intervention is necessary. This is not about turning a blind eye to those who abuse or neglect children. But in the vast majority of cases, parents are not monsters or molesters. They are doing their best

– in circumstances a passing nosy parker cannot know anything about.

You may disapprove entirely of the way another person raises their child. You may choose to do it entirely differently. But we don’t dictate whether people are allowed to have children. Let’s stop dictating how they should bring them up.

Something remarkable happened last week. The Bank of England raised its official interest rate and we hardly heard a squeal from homeowners. Where were the aggrieved couples from Basingstoke – a fixture whenever rates rose in the Eighties – fretting about their mortgage repayments?

The silence from homeowners is partly because the Bank of England rate is still, at 0.75 per cent, extremely low by historic standards. Moreover, many more people now buy homes on fixed-rate mortgages and so are spared immediate pain when the Bank Rate rises. But there is another factor: there are fewer young homeowners to feel aggrieved. In 1996, 54 per cent of 16-34 year olds owned their own home. By 2016 soaring house price inflation had squeezed that to 34 per cent.

Political power now rests less with those who own their homes and much more with frustrated would-be homebuyers. As recently as the 2010 general election both main parties saw rising values as a mark of national wellbeing. They made homeowners feel richer, persuading them to spend more and keep the economy rolling. Falling prices were a disaster, to be staved off at all costs with mortgage interest tax relief, subsidies for public sector homebuyers and eventually, when the market went pop, the lowest interest rates in 300 years.

When the aspirational classes were able to fulfil their homeowning

Increasingly, private citizens seem to feel licensed to police other citizens on the basis of the briefest glimpse into their life

Capitalism seems less appealing when you cannot see how you could acquire the most popular form of capital: a home. Rent control seems, by contrast, very tempting

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion