Childcare is important, but why should work so dominate our lives?

When my three-year-old started nursery earlier this year, no effort had been spared in priming him for the great event. So there was great relief and not a little a smugness when his two-and-half hour stint went without a hitch.

When my three-year-old started nursery earlier this year, no effort had been spared in priming him for the great event. So there was great relief and not a little a smugness when his two-and-half hour stint went without a hitch.

But next morning, when he protested that he wasn't ready to get out of bed, it became clear that our preparations had been deeply flawed. "Come on," his father told him. "You've got to go to school."

The child looked at him with shock, awe and confusion, and uttered just one incredulous word: "Again?"

What do you say in reply to this? The truth, laid bare, is not that appealing. The truth is that nursery school is the start of a process which demands the bulk of our time until we have finished our education, at which point an even more demanding process - a working adulthood, takes over until our old age.

The only thing that gets in the way of this unbroken stint at the educational and economic coalface is the having of children. And what controversies this necessary biological function causes. Until recently parents were left to make their private arrangements about how they coped with such matters. Now, thanks first to feminism, and now to the Labour Government, childcare has come of age as a political issue.

On Thursday, the Conservatives challenged Labour's vision of a developing future for childcare provision in Britain. Labour unveiled plans to provide care at all schools for under-14s from 8.30am until 6.30pm. The Tories unveiled some extremely shaky suggestions about choice, flexibility and the importance of parents in the early years.

You could be fooled into thinking that these were opposing positions, the former concerned mainly with woman's liberation - as it once was quaintly called - and the latter concerned with family values - as the opposite of women's liberation is still sneakily branded.

Certainly, this is how supporters of the traditional agenda want to represent matters. Headlines screaming about 10-hour days for children are designed to conjure images of crazed career women spending no time at all with their kids, at the latter's psychological expense. To them, the fact that women are accused and found guilty of doing to their children exactly what men have always done is neither here nor there.

Yet for most working parents, the rolling out of breakfast-and-after-school care will provide just the sort of choices the Tories say are desirable. Many families won't be leaving their children the full 10 hours. Many won't be using the facilities every day. They're just choices for children of school age, what the Tories say they want as well. Their supporters may disguise their 10-hour days with piano lessons after school and breakfast with the nanny - or fail to disguise them at all by sending their children to boarding school. But really, both parties are singing off similar hymn sheets.

What those hymn sheets say is that the traditionally masculine approach to life - with work and money the be all and end all - has won as the blueprint around which all our society's structures should be arranged. Families may have theoretical choices, but the idea now that parents - to give one tiny example - should automatically be awarded time in the morning to get their children to school is threatened rather than upheld by these proposals. It now seems that among all the wonderful possibilities that equality among the genders offered, the only one to have achieved real dominance is the equality of men, women and children in their lifelong commitment to 50-hour working weeks.

¿ Ironicall, for the poorest workers, in catering, leisure, caring and a host of other jobs, childcare designed to get you into the office for nine and out again at five-thirty doesn't help much at all. With their talk of support for financing au pairs, grandparents and so on, the Tories are closer to championing the most needy than the Labour Party is, even though this is incidental to the real ideological drive of their policy.

We still have no idea how to cope with mental illness

¿ The story of Bill and Wendy Ainscow, the couple who took a cheap flight to Tenerife, slept on the beach for three nights, and then decided to commit suicide, has garnered much shock and public sympathy.

The pair were in debt and in despair over the demands of their 33-year-old daughter Lisa, who suffers from the neurological condition Asperger's syndrome. Intimidated by their daughter into providing her with money to fund obsessive shopping sprees, Mr Ainscow had even stolen £50,000 from the sub-post office he ran to supply the young woman with, among other things, 2,000 pairs of designer shoes.

Although the couple had sectioned Lisa in recent years, she had been released from local authority care despite the clear fact that Mr and Mrs Ainscow could not cope.

Meanwhile, in another incident that oddly mirrors the first, a woman has flown her husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's, from Spain to a British hospital and abandoned him there. She too says she cannot cope with the stress of caring for such a demanding patient.

Finally, five years after his death, Roger Sylvester's family can only look on as a High Court judge overturns a jury's verdict that their son was unlawfully killed by the police. Restrained by eight officers for many hours, even after he had been admitted to hospital, Mr Sylvester, like Lisa Ainscow and this as yet unnamed expatriate, had mental health problems.

When even the police are not expected to understand the first thing about dealing with vulnerable members of the public in one-off incidents - to the point at which we are expected to write it off to experience if citizens die in custody - is it any wonder that ordinary people find themselves in such despair?

Maybe this time...

Poor Liza Minnelli. The men in her life - an estranged husband and a former bodyguard, appear to regard the violence she is alleged to resort to in drunken rages as a way of making a fortune out of her. David Gest, to whom she was briefly married, is suing her for £7.8m claiming that her blows to his head caused brain damage. M'Hammed Soumayah, her £194,000-a-year bodyguard, is claiming £75m, saying that his former employer not only hit him, but also forced him to have sex with her.

It always appears comic when great strapping men declare that tiny drunk women have physically abused them. But any person who lashes out physically - drunk or sober - has big psychological problems. It's men, mainly, who maim people when they lose control in this unconscionable way. And it's men who fill Britain's prisons as a consequence of their violence. Nevertheless, there's only one small prison, HMP Grendon, that really challenges the behaviour of its inmates. Guess what? Its success rate is phenomenal.

We understand that Ms Minnelli is pathetic and needs help. Isn't it time we acted on the knowledge that the same is true in any number of cases?