A WEEK to go until the summer holidays start and it’s the annual juggle for parents who work and who also have those inconvenient things called children.

With three teenagers, I really feel for those parents with younger children who have a clash priorities over the next six weeks; namely work versus childcare.

I particularly sympathise with the families and single parents who have to continue working in order to keep their job yet provide adequate supervision for their children.

Nurseries can be an expensive childcare option and in many cases parents end up working simply in order to pay for their child to go to nursery.

Many would like the option of being able to be a stay-at-home mother but just can’t afford it.

As one of the lucky ones, who was able to be a stay-at-home mother for 12 years while having three children over five-and-a-half years because my husband earned enough to keep us all, I valued and continue to value my good fortune in spending that valuable time with the children I was so thrilled to have.

But for those parents who must choose an alternative, what do you do?

I’ve just been reading a thread on Mumsnet about a mother agonising over how many hours a day her young daughter should go to nursery and how friends were horrified that she was contemplating a day starting at 7.30am and finishing at 5.30pm.

The friend said the mother was a terrible person to even consider leaving her child for such a long day, telling her that she “shouldn’t have bothered having kids if she was gonna dump them at nursery for so long etc” and that it “made her feel like absolute c***”.

The mother wrote: “The logical side of my brain is telling me the person is a complete **** and [my daughter] will be absolutely fine and what the hell are working parents supposed to do, but the mum part of me now feels horrifically guilty. AIBU [am I being unreasonable] to send her in for so long?”

Many of the responses to this reassure her that her daughter will be fine. “I’d go for it,” wrote one. “Children get used to it. Plus assuming it’s a halfway decent nursery, she will nap while she’s there, have periods being outside, active play and quieter periods to chill out.”

Another wrote: “It’s fine. Mine did 7.30am to 6pm for three days a week from their first birthday. No issues, they loved it. Some kids were doing that full time and are now happy and well adjusted children.”

A third hit the nail on the head: “Obviously, we’d all love our kids to be with a parent the majority of the time but it’s just not an option.”

Most of them believed the friend who criticised the mother is indeed a dreadful person: “I can’t believe people can be so rude”, said one, another writing that she sounds like “a melodramatic idiot”.

Well, I don’t think it’s rude to offer an opinion, even and especially if it’s not the opinion you want to hear.

The whole point of airing your worries is to invite a variety of views, some of which may not have occurred to you before and which may affect your final decision. To then criticise and indeed insult someone for offering an honestly felt view is just not on.

The problem is that it is considered to be akin to treason to criticise a parent’s decision to put their child in a nursery. Stay-at-home mothers are the enemy of the modern woman whiner seen as betraying feminism and the women who want to both work and have children.

Somehow they pose a threat to the advancement of women’s careers. As a result, they are publicly despised as throwbacks to the days of the “housewife”.

I can categorically state that a stay-at-home mother is in no way a “housewife”. I for one stayed at home because I wanted to be with my children in their first vulnerable years and then to be around as they grew up. I didn’t stay at home to clean the house.

And being a stay-at-home mother didn’t turned me into a thick or stupid person, or even less of an ambitious one. In fact, it has added a whole new dimension to my life experience as I’ve learnt about babies, toddlers, children and teenagers in a very hands-on way, it has added to my knowledge of the world and it has enriched my life in ways that a job cannot.

As parents, we all have to make choices and we make the choices that suit our circumstances and our needs at the time. Being a mother at home is just not the “right” thing to be these days but for many women, and their families, it is the right thing to be. Feminism was all about enabling women to make their own choices. This is one of them. Let them be.