Letter: Whose benefit?

Sir: What - doubtless unconscious - irony that the Government should recognise the enormous debt it owes to unpaid domestic carers almost on the same day that it declares its determination to get single mothers into work.

In the brave new world of the working mother, we are producing a whole generation of children brought up, from the age of six months, in institutions. What duty of care (how absurdly old fashioned that phrase already sounds) will these children owe their parents when they become ill, disabled or simply too old to cope?

No child can ever learn to sacrifice its convenience for others if it has never seen its parents do so. Why should any child, put into a nursery from infancy so that its mother can go out to work, feel any compunction about putting its elderly parents into care when they cease to manage by themselves?

As we sow, so shall we reap.

Mrs DORAINE POTTS

Oxford