The mother-bashing season has started again - why don't they just throw us on the pyre with the livestock? I'll tell you why. They have research. Research is worse than burning any day. Because I know that, as a mother, that's how I feel when I've read it. Like I've been burned.

Here's the latest fuel for the fire: the longer young children spend in childcare away from their parents, the more likely they are to show aggressive behaviour when they reach nursery school, according to Jay Belsky, professor of psychology at Birkbeck College, London.

"There is a constant relationship between time in care and problems of behaviour, especially those involving aggression," he concluded. This comes on the heels of another British study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which found that for every year a mother worked before her children started school, the prospects of their gaining at least one A-level fell by seven-to-nine per cent.

Belsky's government-funded research was conducted in the US, where he followed 1,300 children for 10 years from ages one to 11. He found that children who spent more than 30 hours per week in daycare before school age were three times more likely to be considered aggressive by teachers, mothers and carers. That sounds bad.

But look at it another way: only 17 per cent of children who spent more than 30 hours per week in daycare were aggressive, compared to a mere six per cent of children who spent less than 10 hours per week in daycare.

In other words 83 per cent of children who spend more than 30 hours per week in day care don't have problems with aggression. Aggression was defined as "gets in lots of fights", "cruelty", "explosive behaviour", "talking too much" and "argues a lot". Daycare was defined as a child being cared for by anyone other than the mother. Relatives, nannies and daycare centres were all lumped in together.

If you want to reduce the risk of your child being aggressive, limit your child's time in daycare, Belsky advised. Yet at the same time, he felt his research was not strong enough to conclude that daycare actually causes behaviour problems.

Belsky's research is undermined by the fact that his is the first to come to this conclusion. Previous research has shown that good quality daycare is beneficial for children's language and social skills.

So what Belsky is expressing is an opinion.

Further diluting the mother-burning power of the research is the fact that potential problems with aggression can be offset by good-quality daycare, especially where carers spent a lot of time reading to and talking with children, Belsky says himself.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation research found the same thing. While it showed that young adults were more likely to be unemployed or psychologically stressed the longer their mothers had worked full-time during their childhoods, it also showed that the risk was far less for the children of high-earning professionals who could afford good-quality care.

So, if you are doing your darndest to make sure your children are well cared for, not only is the likelihood that your child will be made aggressive by daycare small, but you may be eliminating the risk entirely.

Now the research looks different, doesn't it?

Feeling a little less burned?

The infuriating thing is not the research itself. We need good, sound research to guide us towards what is best for our children. What really makes me angry is Belsky's recommendation on foot of his research, that "mothers" cut down their working hours. He kindly adds that if cutting down hours creates economic hardship, this could be worse than having the child in daycare.

Gee thanks. What a load of paternalistic garbage.

Why are we talking about "mothers" cutting down their working hours? Why aren't we talking about "parents" cutting down their working hours? Where are the fathers in all of this?

We mothers always allow ourselves to be blamed. No matter how hard we try to juggle and balance and compensate - usually at the risk of our own health - we are bound to fail.

It is the paternalistic system that's to blame, not mothers. I had a good long, therapeutic rant on the phone about all this with Bernie Purcell, author of the childcare book For Our Own Good (Collins, £8.99). She is feeling outraged that anyone would suggest that it is mothers who need to cut their working hours or stop working completely. Mothers have a right to work outside the home, she says.

It's not necessarily healthy for women to give up careers to spend 12 hours a day looking after children, she points out. And we shouldn't assume that every woman is psychologically and emotionally equipped to spend 12 hours a day nurturing a child. This relationship could actually be harmful if a mother were very controlling or impatient.

What we need to get from this new research is an entirely different message, which is that it may be that spending more than 30 hours per week in daycare is undesirable for a young child. Purcell certainly believes it is.

There are Irish children who spend 12hour days in creches and daycare centres. Why? Parents are working far too many hours. "Life has got too manic," as Bernie puts it.

We need to use research like Belsky's not to bash mothers, but as ammunition for our own cause. That cause is to change a system that isn't working. "It's not mothers, it's the system that's wrong," says Bernie.

Purcell thinks a huge improvement in family life would come from the simple measure of ensuring that parents of children under eight never have to work longer than a 34-hour week. The hours would also be flexible.

That way, if two parents are involved, they can work flexible hours and share the childcare. One parent could start work earlier and be home earlier, another could start work later and be home later. There might be only four hours in the day when the child needs to be in daycare. Twenty hours a week in daycare? Not a problem.

Work culture doesn't allow parents to ask for fewer and more flexible hours. The more high-status the job, the less leniency is allowed.

The system won't change until fathers have the confidence to insist that it does. Fathers deserve and enjoy more time with their children. But they cannot demand this in a society that does not value fatherhood.

The answer is to value fatherhood and motherhood equally so that family friendly work becomes a right, not a concession.

But government isn't listening. It pays lip-service to "family friendly hours" and focuses its efforts on getting more women into the workplace to benefit the economy, instead of making working life better for parents - male and female - in order to benefit families.

We women are partly to blame for allowing the arguments to be focused on the issue of what makes a good or a bad mother. We are all doing our best. Instead of feeling guilty, we should feel angry. And so should fathers.

We have a chance now, Bernie argues, to learn from other countries like Sweden and develop and family-nurturing system that works. But it won't happen until more fathers get interested.