Letter: Care after school

Sir: Mothers who wish to stay at home should be paid to look after their pre-school children.

Carmen Fielding's article "Why working life is not always a bed of roses" (27 November) is realistic and poignant. I am also a working mother;however I have five children, and with each one have experienced different periods of maternity leave, culminating most recently in a year.

The decision by Harriet Harman to invest millions of pounds in child care encourages the view that the separation of a child from its parents is not only natural but desirable. The result will be even more mothers forced through poverty to work in order to pay someone else to look after their young children.

For those mothers who wish to stay at home this amounts to an inefficient distribution of child care, to say nothing of the effects on their children of impoverished parenting.

CAROLYN BUTLER

London SW5