I took a long maternity leave — more than a year — and part of the reason was my inability to resume concentration after the arrival of my daughter.

In that time, I started to feel restless and had a Feminine Mystique moment where I realised that if I don’t start thinking about something other than what to make for dinner, I’m going to lose my mind. The thing about being solely a mother was that it felt so physical. I was getting up at dawn, living on the rhythms of the earth, like a farmer, and I loved it. But after a certain point, it didn’t work for me.

I don’t so much see a deterioration, with brilliant women who give it all up, as an increase in obsessions and concerns about things that I don’t think are worthy of them. The form these mundane preoccupations take nowadays is often purely materialistic. It seems crucially important that our children have the right toddler bed or the fanciest winter coat, and a lot of time is spent on these pursuits. Whether this is a permanent condition, I have no idea. To me, it’s about life and time well spent. If you’re sitting outside in a beautiful garden having dinner and this is your life, do you really want to spend your time thinking about school admissions, which paediatrician to go to or what kind of nappy bag to buy?

There is an incredibly powerful fantasy of being taken care of — or dominated, even — by a man. I lived that a little in my year of not working. I understand the appeal, but I see the bargains and exchanges people in this situation make and the power dynamics of it, and it is not how I want to live. As Oscar Wilde said: “When you marry for money, you earn it.”

I have just written a book about literary couples in 1920s London. Their approach to parenting was totally different. Back then, they believed children would grow up and be fine, like house plants. The idea of tailoring one’s personal life to suit the children was alien to them. There was no sense that family life, or, in particular, the parents’ pursuit of love, should in any way revolve around the child. The writer Rebecca West sent her son to boarding school before he was four, and he was extremely bitter. She did this partly for her work and partly because her lover and his father, HG Wells, found him rather inconvenient.

But in other instances, the children ended up fine. For example, the son of the artist Vanessa Bell grew up with a large amount of chaos and an enormous amount of love. He ended up healthy, incredibly productive and feeling warmly about his childhood.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, my parents would have parties and the children would run around the garden, staying up late and eating what they felt like — there was much less of a controlling atmosphere. Now, we try to control every aspect of our children’s lives. We think we can create the perfect child by giving them the right music lessons or choosing the right pushchair. It is taboo that any conversation with another adult should take precedence over something going on with your child. When I was a child, children played, and I don’t remember expecting my mother to give me her attention no matter what she was doing.

A friend recently bought her two-year-old a pair of squeaky trainers that make the most annoying sound — a noise that would drive any adult insane. The fact that the child wanted the trainers was, for my friend, enough of a justification for inflicting them on herself, her husband and her family. So her world is punctuated by an unbearable high-pitched squeaking. To me, this is a metaphor for our generation’s philosophy of parenting.

Nowadays, people plan their weekends around what their children want to do, rather than having them experience life through their parents. In some marriages I see, the kids end up as a substitute for adult relationships; the relationship between the parents becomes so much about the children that it gets in the way of adult intimacy.

A lot of my friends who don’t work — and it was the same for me when I didn’t — indulge in a willing suspension of the world of ideas and immerse themselves in the rather dull world of kids’ trivia. You find yourself at a dinner party and, instead of talking about novels or politics, the discussion is about whether it’s important to make your own baby food. Even fascinating and brilliant women can revert to this incredibly mundane topic.

There is a danger in the way we focus on raising our children. The book The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy, which came out last year, epitomises the romanticising of this idea, this kind of wholesome woman who stays at home and doesn’t aspire to anything. She is not that interested in her looks and yet she is magically attractive to everybody. It’s a perverse glamour, one that adheres to old-fashioned ideas of what a woman should be.

I think it is related to the bitterness we have towards our men for not changing enough nappies or not waking up enough at night, or about who is really doing all the work. To me, worrying about that stuff is a pointless and boring expenditure of energy.

In the 1930s, Winifred Holby, a journalist friend of the writer Vera Brittain, wrote about what she called the “rich unrest of family life”. I think that we’re supposed to embrace that rich unrest. It evokes a different attitude to the difficulty and chaos of child-rearing. We seem to be so oppressed by all these basic aspects of child-rearing, and I wonder if it is not self-imposed.

It also displays a lack of imagination and tolerance. Is it okay if someone raises their children differently, if a mother, instead of giving them art projects, puts them in front of videos at 8am so she can get dressed? Our judgments contain our own insecurities and a lack of imagination.

My house is a little different; it is just me and my daughter, Violet. She is a sophisticated, intense five-year-old. I have her full time, but she also spends time with her father. It is a little atypical. I have a full-time nanny, shared with my sister. During the week, I spend an hour with her in the morning before school and , bathing dolls and all that.

The thing I find mindless is the playground. My daughter is into cycling and scootering, but I find it unbelievably boring. Forty years ago, my mother, Anne Richardson Roiphe, wrote a novel, Up the Sandbox!, all about the boredom of being stuck in the playground. My mother was a 1970s feminist: women were going to work and she thought her generation would revolutionise life. But, of course, we have not really progressed in our mythologies. We remain enamoured of the traditional ideas of what a mother is. I still find myself getting up at 5am to make cupcakes for my daughter’s birthday — it is not possible for me to buy cupcakes without surrendering some sense of self. Of course, my daughter wouldn’t care if the cakes were bought, but to me it makes a difference. These old-fashioned ideas of motherhood still have a huge hold over us.

I’m tempted to give up work every day. As well as writing books, I’m also a professor. There are times where the main crisis of my week is how I can buy a pint of milk. On class picnics, I feel the energy of these ferocious businesswomen who opted out. I can’t help but wonder what that would feel like as a life choice. I notice that a lot of energy goes into the choice of food in the picnic.

But a full, chaotic life appeals to me. I would be a terrible mother if I didn’t work — I’d go crazy. And I the fact like that my daughter sees me working. I want her to do whatever she wants in life.

Katie Roiphe is the author of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1919-1939 (Virago £12.99)

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