The archbishop has said that the State should do all it can to support mothers who choose not to work outside the home, because theirs is the responsible choice. His statement was insensitive, foolish, wrong-minded and above all, deeply insulting to all women who work outside the home and yet still raise children. I am one of them. Where does he imagine the children of working mothers are: abandoned in the streets without food and clean clothing, playing in the gutter and shooting heroin? This constant disparagement of working mothers and lionisation of housewives is insufferable. There are relatively few working mothers in Malta, and yet the islands are teeming with problem children, problem teenagers, and problem adults. Rudeness and bad behaviour are rife. Petty and even serious crime is on the increase. Alcoholism and drug addiction are rampant. Yet virtually all these children, teenagers and adults were brought up by housewives who stayed at home to look after them, or who just stayed at home because they couldn’t be bothered to go out to work. Whether mothers stay at home or not makes little difference to whether their children turn out well, and we have plenty of evidence in Malta to prove it. We are hardly a nation of model citizens, and yet 99.9 per cent of the population was brought up by housewives.

When I was growing up, there were plenty of heroin addicts and kids who wrecked their brains and eventually their lives with acid. They all had stay-at-home mothers. There were boys who stole, girls who slept around like cats on heat and even a couple of them who went to London to strip and make porn films, kids who drank themselves half to death and who smoked like chimneys, boys who brawled and girls who bullied and bitched other girls until they were suicidal, teenagers who spiralled into depression and one or two who killed themselves in the end. They all had stay-at-home mothers. We all did, and we all turned out differently. It’s not whether your mother stays at home instead of going out to work that counts, but what kind of woman she is, and what kind of a man she is married to.

By sanctifying housewives, the archbishop shows that he hasn’t a clue what he is talking about. There is more errant behaviour among stay-at-home mothers than there is among working ones – not just because there are more of them but because there is truth in the dictum that the devil finds work for idle hands. That was as true in the 1960s and 1970s as it is today. There were stay-at-home mothers who had affairs, stay-at-home mothers who drank, stay-at-home mothers who were zonked out on anti-depressants, stay-at-home mothers hooked on the housewife drug Valium, stay-at-home mothers who were never at home, stay-at-home mothers whose children went straight to the neighbours after school because mummy was in bed with their best friend’s father, and stay-at-home mothers who spent all day in a dressing-gown and whose children foraged in the fridge for their own lunch. This still happens today. In fact, the problems with stay-at-home mothers are probably even worse now than they were then, because there is more scope for trouble. Men who won’t “allow” their wives to work because they might meet men and have affairs really don’t know the half of it. This is not to say that housewives have problems because they don’t work. It’s just to point out that stay-at-home mothers are often bad, inadequate or incompetent at raising their children, and the results are all around us in the population of the Maltese Islands: murderers, thieves, liars, cheats, savages, drunkards and drug addicts, back-stabbers, shallow and unprincipled people, illiterates and sub-literates, people with no manners, the anti-social and the poorly socialised, and people who never know how to behave in any given situation. All of these were raised by housewives.

Very often, you can’t or shouldn’t fall into the trap of blaming the mother, because there are certain cases in which the child is going to be a problem whatever the parents do. I have in mind a few of my contemporaries who destroyed themselves despite growing up in a loving home with decent, attentive parents, which only served to compound the tragedy.

To insult working women by saying that women who don’t work make better mothers is unwise and pointlessly offensive. Women who don’t work do not make better mothers than women who work. How good a mother a woman is depends on her personal characteristics, her education, her perceptiveness, and her social skills. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with whether she works or does not work. Very often, because so-called “career women” are better socialised, better educated, more well-informed, and more highly skilled, efficient and generally competent than their stay-at-home contemporaries, their children turn out to be that way too. Yes, there is a difference between the children of “career women” and the children of housewives: the children of the former are generally speaking more competent and adept at coping with life, less childishly dependent, and more responsible.

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Some months ago, I read a magazine feature based on interviews with prominent Maltese ‘career women’ (I have to put it in inverted commas because it’s so stupid, given that there are no career men). The journalist found a common factor in these women: without exception, they are all daddy’s girls, which is roughly the inverse of being a mummy’s boy. She reached the conclusion that daddy’s girls take on the masculine role model rather than the female one, and this sets the pattern for life. I thought that missed the point. What happens in these cases is that yes, the girl does end up favouring a working life because she models herself on her father, but if she was a mummy’s girl rather than a daddy’s girl and her mother worked too, then she would become a working woman through modelling herself on her mother. Perhaps there are so few working women of my generation because only our fathers worked and daddy’s girls tended to be the exception rather the rule. Most women of my generation modelled themselves on their non-working mothers – and yes, incidentally, I am a daddy’s girl too. I can see this happening in the upcoming generation. Because so many women of my generation don’t work, they are raising daughters with little or no inclination towards a career or even a job. They have modelled themselves on their mothers, and they just don’t want to work. All they want is a husband with money and an easy life. So perhaps the archbishop can relax. The next generation of spineless people is in the bag.

The worst aspect of the archbishop’s tirade against working mothers, though, was its disparaging rudeness. He said that when both parents are ‘constrained’ to work to pay off debts, they are unable to bring up their children properly and damage is done to them. How very insulting and condescending. Some of the most appalling young adults I know have been brought up by housewives. On the other hand, all the young adults I know who have been brought up by working mothers are well behaved, hardworking, responsible, and able to hold their own in conversation. They are decent people with a sense of responsibility, who are well aware of the direct link between work and money, and that if you want money you damn well have to work for it. The children of working mothers are far less likely to be spoiled, lazy and selfish than the children of stay-at-home mothers. Two of the nicest, most competent and self-reliant young men I know grew up without mothers at all, and were raised by single fathers. My hard-working and responsible best friend was raised by a single father too. If children grow up seeing one parent working like a dog and the other parent playing tennis, shopping for clothes and taking naps in the afternoon, it’s no surprise that almost all daughters and even some sons are going to model themselves on the parent with the easy life. And the archbishop should believe me on this one: that’s where the problems begin.

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Somebody should tell the archbishop that women who work don’t necessarily do so because of debts. Lots of us do so because we want to. I think he needs to reread the parable about the waste of talents. Sitting at home washing the floor – or worse, having your husband pay somebody else to do the cleaning while you do literally nothing – when you have talents and skills that are going to waste is, if you see things religiously, a sin against God. And if you don’t see things religiously, it is still a shameful waste.

It is the women who make the most of their personal abilities, their God-given abilities if the archbishop wishes to see it that way, even though they have children to raise, who should be held up as examples and praised. They are maximising their talents, earning money for the household, and raising children that anyone would be proud of. They are doing much more, and often are far better at it, than the ones who make a career out of cleaning the windows, and who still somehow succeed in raising children with abysmal social and life skills.

Stop running us down, Your Grace. We’ve had enough of being told that we are doing a worse job of raising our children than the stay-at-home mothers of thieves, junkies and lazy sods. It’s not housewives who need State support, for heaven’s sake. It’s working mothers who need that support in the form of systems which acknowledge that both parents are out of the house for most of the day, and that there isn’t some little woman at home waiting for deliveries and repair men, or to accommodate teachers who take umpteen training days and holidays during which children are given days off from school.

You’d think this was a country in which fathers have no role at all. Mothers are always portrayed without a father around – like in that stupid statue set up on a Naxxar roundabout by the Gift for Life movement. And now the archbishop wants the State to take on the role of the husband, and hand out money to women who stay at home to look after their children, despite the fact that they are married and those children have a father. What are we coming to? If a woman expects to hang around the house while raising children, then she should marry a man who can afford to support the lot of them, and not expect the taxpayer to fund her life choices, with the backing of the archbishop. For every woman paid by the State to sit at home and raise kids, there will have to be another five women working their butts off and paying taxes to fund her. How fair is that? If you can’t afford children, don’t have them. It’s that simple.