Even today, Tracey’s choice is polarising ...but should it be?

MY FIRST son was only a few months old when a crisis in the Middle East exploded. The call came from the news desk: did I want to go, since I was this newspaper’s foreign correspondent?

Despite the dopamine hit of the call and the unshakeable love I have for newspapers, my answer stood: No. I didn’t want to leave my son. Couldn’t, actually.

He’s almost 18 now, on the brink of flying the nest for university, but our parting will be on his terms, not mine.

Many of my female friends – the city trader, the lawyer, the Army officer, the midwife, the teacher, the anaesthetist and the TV presenter – are today in the same position with their children.

Working mothers are everywhere, so I’m puzzled by Tracey Neville’s decision to pursue a career 10,500 miles away from her three-year-old son Nev. There’s nothing better than doing a fulfilling job and then going home for tea, bath and bed, so why didn’t she just take him with her? Italian premier Giorgia Meloni manages to run a country while raising a seven-year-old, which she pointed out last week, urging mothers back to work.

But while Gary Neville is right to hail his sister’s pursuit of a career at the highest level, for Tracey to leave her toddler in the UK while she builds a netball franchise in Australia remains – even in 2024 – a polarising choice.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be. After all, no one asked Gary Neville if he was taking his two young daughters with him when he left the UK in 2015 to manage Spanish football club Valencia.

Same in my house. Six weeks after our boy was born, my husband, a soldier, left for six months to fight in Afghanistan.

In the politics of parental equality, both partners might be the same, but in the science of child attachment, they’re not.

The Association of Child Psychotherapists is clear there’s no bond as powerful as that between a small child and their major caregiver – usually their mother – from pregnancy and birth through to the age of five.

Tracey’s late father, the football agent and Bury FC director Neville Neville, who shepherded her and her two brothers to sporting greatness, used to tell his daughter to ‘take your opportunity today because that may never come tomorrow’.

He was talking about sport but you could apply his advice to early parenting, too.

Working mothers can’t have it all but it’s OK to keep trying. During a pause in an interview, I almost nodded off on blockbuster author Sophie Kinsella’s couch after several nights broken by a sick toddler. When she returned to the room with a tray of tea, she put it down just loudly enough to rouse me. Afterwards, she wrote a treasured note of support. That meant a lot – coming as it did from a working mother of five.

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