Don’t tell mum we need her

You know the sort; perennially cheerful, handy in the kitchen and usually seen wearing a tight-fitting pair of trousers, which almost always have a set of keys and a mobile phone clipped to the waistband.

They are not ashamed to parrot this god-awful saying, one which was abandoned by everybody else back in the late 1980s along with smoking in the office and avocado bathroom fittings, because they sincerely believe it to be true.

There are millions of chaps out there who wouldn’t dream of admitting that they always do as they are told at home, for fear of being laughed out of the five o’clock club down at the Old Duck and the Duck.

While it isn’t a particularly macho admission to make, there is now academic evidence which appears to show that there is much truth in this most aggravating of phrases.

A heavy-duty piece of work conducted by the Marriage Foundation has shown families are happier when mum has a smile on her face.

Using data gathered by the Millennium Cohort study, which involved 13,000 couples being tracked since the turn of this century, it showed that if a mother was happy then her children would be less likely to develop mental health issues.

Content women enjoy a good relationship with their family, including their partners.

The founder of the Marriage Foundation, a former High Court judge called Sir Paul Coleridge, was last week quoted as saying the ingredient to keeping the whole family beaming like the Von Trapps at the end of The Sound of Music could only come from the ‘mother figure’.

In case you are wondering, the same study found that the mental wellbeing of dads had no influence on that of his offspring.

Modern families come in all shapes and sizes but, while many of these work very effectively, we do have to face the fact that a happy mum makes life easier for everybody.