Around the time I returned to work after the birth of my first child I went to visit a lawyer friend who had also just had a baby and had decided to stay at home to look after him.

The lunch was going fine until I said that I envied her not having a job: it must be nice to be with her son all day. She looked at me with something close to loathing. She did have a job, she snapped. Bringing up her child was most definitely a job, and a much more worthwhile one than anything to do with corporate law.

But was she right? Is motherhood a job? Margaret Thatcher thought it was - according to her bringing up children was a management job. The queen apparently thinks so too and told Kate Winslet that it was "the best job" there was.

Yet it now seems that middle-class mothers have changed their minds. The same sort of women who used to get furious with anyone who implied that raising children was not a job are now equally indignant with those who say it is one. Last week Mumsnet, a social network for parents, put out a press release laying down the new law: “Motherhood is an emotional journey, not a job.”

This is the right answer but for the wrong reason. Bringing up children is not a job and never was one. Parenting is work – sometimes extremely hard work – but is not a job as you do not get paid. The deal with a job is that you opt to do it and can resign whenever you like, but while you are doing it you must toe the line.

Throw things

As a columnist I have to write this column because it is my job. As a parent I can decide that I can’t be bothered to cook and order takeaway instead. At home in extremis I can shout and throw things; if I did that at work I would probably get fired.

No matter how much my children think I am making a poor fist of bringing them up, they can’t get rid of me. Parenting is for life. Jobs are not.

Yet motherhood is not an “emotional journey” either. A journey is something that involves travelling from A to B, whereas mothering tends to be pretty static, in my case happening almost entirely in the kitchen.

Neither is it a journey in any cheesy metaphorical sense. Motherhood starts at full emotional throttle and proceeds in the same vein forever.

The worst thing about describing raising children like this is not that it is brainless, but that it is exceedingly off-putting. If someone had told me at the outset that what I was embarking on was an “emotional journey” I would have gone off the idea altogether.

So why have mothers changed their minds about the job question? I suspect it is because we no longer think of jobs in the way we used to. Twenty years ago a job was a sign of status; now it is seen as drudgery and suggests a lack of imagination. Anyone who likes theirs has to pretend that they don’t view it as a job at all but as an outlet for their passion and creativity.

Mothers used to insist on calling what they did a job because it made them feel better; now it does the reverse. Yet both reactions are daft. Jobs and parenting are equally vital to the survival of the human race, but the two activities exist on different planes and moral comparisons ought not to come into it.

Saatchi & Saatchi has just done some research for Mumsnet on what the non-job of bringing up children is all about. It has concluded that mothers play eight different emotional roles, five of which I more or less agree with – carer, fan, friend, hero, safe house – while the remaining three – partner in crime, coach and rule-breaker – make me feel very worried indeed.

Rule breaker? Partner in crime? What happened to nag or rule enforcer? What am I meant to say to my teenage son when he comes home from school with a bag full of trigonometry homework? Sod that, here is some fake ID – why not go to the pub instead?

This soppy list of roles tells us that there is one thing modern parenting has in common with modern jobs. Both have gone so far from the Theory X view of motivation – that everyone is basically lazy and so a little authoritarianism is called for – that they now shy away from ever saying: I am in charge.

Greatest skill

Managers have to pretend that their greatest skill is as a coach; parents have to do the same. It’s all for show: very little coaching goes on in most companies; even less happens at home. Coaches have to have distance, patience and objectivity – hard to feel any of that towards your maddening, beloved child.

The pretence that motherhood is one long, democratic, emotional, jolly jape is a far worse lie than the one that says motherhood is a job. In the end, I am with Thatcher who insisted that being a mother was a management job. She was wrong about the job; right about management. Ft.com