The article looks at two different studies, LSE researcher Dr. Wendy Sigle-Rushton’s study linking the amount of time husbands spend in housework with divorce rates and a study carried out at Clayman Institute Gender Research at Stanford University which looked at the role housework plays in academic scientists’ productivity. Based on these studies, the authors recommend professionalising household labour.

Danielle Raine, author of Housework Blues: A Survival Guide explains how she came to realise how important housework is through a change in attitude and the discovery that professional skills could be used to run a home more efficiently.

There are some topics that usually get written off because they are considered to be either a minefield of stereotypes (feminist claims), easily manipulated (immigration), or not worth discussing at all (housework). The combination of these themes can be explosive because it highlights something that is rarely brought up in debates about immigration: the care children and the elderly receive in First World countries is given at the expense of immigrant women who stop looking after their own children in their countries of origin.

Regular family meals have proven to show that teenagers are more likely to receive better grades at school and less likely to turn to substance abuse and other bad behaviours. Even if it’s not very long this time is seen as valuable, where children have in some way, the support of their parents.

Finding the time to sit down together as a family for dinner can be a challenge. But a challenge that is apparently worthwhile. After decades of decline, there is evidence that many families are making the effort to gather at the dinner table – the place that seems to help reinforce the family unit.

There is something about a regular shared meal that anchors a family, no matter what the food is nor the topic of conversation. Research is showing again and again that family meals are what help teach children to be a positive member of their culture.

53% of people think poor parenting is the main cause of bad behaviour and 85% blame parents for allowing children to become out of control. So maybe a little help at a particularly difficult time from a ‘super-nanny’ could be hugely effective; a ‘helping-hand’ would make parenting easier.

As advertising campaigns resort to the claim that the perfect washer and dryer create the perfect family, family life in fact is as rushed and chaotic as ever turning the so called ‘perfect kitchen’ into no more than an empty kitchen as family meals decline.

What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair… Perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.

Teachers forsee a tragedy on the child and the family, yet the government believes that the idea that somehow women going back to work are letting down their children is frankly ludicrous.