That’s the unnerving message delivered by psychiatrist Dennis Friedman in his new book The Unsolicited Gift. Start delegating your child-rearing responsibilities too soon, he warns, and you risk equipping your son with lifelong double standards when it comes to women.

“It introduces to him the concept of The Other Woman,” Dr Friedman explains. “It creates a division in his mind between the woman he knows to be his natural mother and the woman with whom he has the real hands-on relationship: the woman who bathes him and takes him to the park, and with whom he feels completely at one.

“As a result, he grows up with the idea that although he will one day go through all the social and sexual formalities of marriage, he will have at the back of his mind the notion of this other woman, who not only knows, but caters for, all his needs.”

And that’s just the boys. Baby girls who miss out on this early maternal closeness will, Friedman says, spend the rest of their lives with a “vacuum of need” inside them, which they will seek to fill in a variety of harmful ways (drink, drugs, sex, money).

So is it ever safe, then, for mothers to share their baby care duties?

“After about a year,” Friedman says. “I know that this will not be a popular thing for me to say. I know that women will go, ‘Who does this man think he is, saying I can’t go out and pursue my career and social life for a whole year? … Continue reading