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If Mom or Dad simply feels that their 6-week-old just doesn't seem like a Jude, it may be prudent to relax.

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[There was] growing awareness that Quebec's incentive policies were not producing the expected birth increases. Although there was an initial increase in the late 1980s in the total fertility rate from 1.49 children per woman in 1988 to 1.72 in 1990, after 1990 total births decreased, and families with three or more children remained uncommon. Overall, policies favoring third and subsequent children were viewed increasingly as contrary to the needs of most families.

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Clearly, promoting higher fertility has not been effective for the past half-century. Like many other modern societies, Quebec faces a low birth rate and an aging population. The Quebec government cannot convince women to bear more children than they desire.

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Reactions to these forms of direct financial assistance varied. Noninterventionists argued that fertility decisions were individual, not governmental, responsibilities. Some even charged that the pronatalists had invented a fertility crisis to advance the nationalist agenda. One scathing critique by feminist professor Heather Maroney of the University of Carleton charged that Quebec's pronatal policies marginalized women, reducing them to objects of demographic policy.

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I agree with French feminist Elisabeth Badinter, who, in her short, sharp polemic The Conflict, argues that intensive, obsessive mothering bodes ill for women's equality. As long as women's primary focus is domestic, men will run the world and make the rules... Dr Bill Sears, guru of attachment parenting and, not incidentally, a devout Christian, is fairly explicit that mothers shouldn't have jobs – he even suggests that couples borrow money from their parents to enable the wife to stay home.

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Not only is this arrangement bad for women; I don't think it's necessarily good for children either – being hovered over constantly and obliged to serve the emotional needs of an adult who has blocked herself from normal adult modes of pleasure and accomplishment. (One woman profiled in Time has even given up her friends. The only time she let anyone else care for her baby was when she was in labour producing another.) What does attachment parenting tell daughters about how big their dreams should be? How does it teach sons not to expect women to cater to their every whim? How does it teach any child that the world does not revolve around him or her? It's true that only a tiny number of families practice attachment parenting to the full – there are only 5 million stay-at-home mothers in the whole country, and most of them are either very wealthy or very poor – but its ideals are pervasive: As Badinter puts it, Baby is king; Mom is servant.

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Badinter blames intensive mothering for distorting feminism and pulling women back into the home. But one could also say it's a socially approved way of withdrawing from a workplace that, in addition to all the usual sorrows and pains, has been sexist in general and hostile to mothers in particular, and of resolving the frustrations of the double day – women's greater domestic burden.

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Where Badinter goes wrong is that she blames women for adapting to this unjust state of affairs by moralising their own subjection and making it the basis for their identity. This lets men off the hook yet again.

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But Germany's anti-child campaigners who fervently believe the next generation should be seen and not heard – at least not in their backyards – are finally being slapped down by new legislation on its way through parliament which is designed to protect children's right to be children.

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"Tolerance and acceptance towards the laughing, screeching, singing and cries of children must be considered an absolute normality."