Let me take you back to 1978.

My son had just been born and I was a teacher at a school for foreign adults learning English. Despite maternity rights being enshrined in law two years earlier, my employers threatened to sack me if I didn’t come back to work after a month off.

Women of my generation and those who came after have walked a long, rocky, thorny road to get the maternity rights parents have today.

Money was tight and I had post-natal depression. My mum, Jena, moved in to care for me and my boy. When he was six months old, we relocated to London, and I got a job at a better paid language school. Jena came with us. She loved being a granny-nanny and family cook too. I never had to worry about pick-up times or whether he was being well looked after, or what we would eat every night.

Many others did what Jena did back then and do so now. Without the unrecognised contribution by generous grandmothers and grandfathers too, low-paid working mums could not........

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