Muddling: How ad hoc childcare become the new normal for stressed parents like me

Last week, during lunch with a mum friend, a deal was proposed to me. If my friend dropped my two children at school every day, could she leave her newborn son at mine three mornings a week? Just until she’s done at the office at around 11am? I nearly spat out my coffee. She then suggested that she’d happily pick up my kids from school if, say, she suddenly had a work lunch she couldn’t get out of, which would mean she wouldn’t be around until 2pm rather than 11. “He’s no trouble, I promise,” she said, with slight desperation in her eyes. “He just sits in his bouncer cooing.”

I told my friend I couldn’t do it – “I have to work, too,” I said. An unusual request, though, this isn’t. More and more middle-class parents are opting for “muddling” – meaning to forgo expensive nannies or nursery school, and just hoping for the best with friends or. That, surely, is priceless.