I worry for the way that children are being brought up these days - Sarah Todd

Thank goodness not sat slack-jawed scrolling down their phones. They both have a work ethic and keep in touch with their parents and grandparents. They’re not perfect, but we can’t really ask for much more.

There are worries for them though, such as how on earth they will ever be able to buy their own homes and in any way replicate the rural childhood that they were lucky enough to enjoy.

There was just six weeks’ maternity leave for each child and then back to the grindstone for this mother. A baby hadn’t ever even been held before the first one. But, back in the day, there was a week in the local market town’s hospital where midwives explained how to hold and feed them, put them in their cots and give them a bath. They even brought around cocoa at bedtime (for the mothers) and let us sleep while they kept an eye on them. “You’ll be grateful for this rest when you get home,” they told us. And we were. Now, new mothers are booted out at an average of between six and 24 hours, and it’s impossible not to wonder whether there is any correlation between that and problems further down the line.

But back to being in hospital confinement that first time. It turned out the girl in the next-door bed lived in the same village. Because your correspondent was always working, we had never met. She was also from a farming family and we are still friends, as are our daughters who were born a day apart. It’s impossible to imagine that kind of connection being made nowadays.

As an aside, one in seven to ten mothers develop postnatal depression and, low and behold, the NHS website warns ‘It can also affect fathers and partners’.

For heaven’s sake. Depressed … with two weeks paid paternity leave? But no, studies apparently show that new fathers can experience postpartum depression, feeling ‘sad, tired, overwhelmed, anxious’ or because of changes in their usual eating and sleeping patterns.

Can’t women have anything these days that is just for them? Incidentally, hell would have frozen before this correspondent would have had her husband hanging around like a spare part for a fortnight.

It's time for the world to man up. But oh no, a quick look online tells me that what might seem like a harmless way to tell someone to get a grip on their responsibilities can ‘feed harmful stereotypes and put a certain pressure on men to conform to these expectations’.

We need, as a nation, to press pause on all these small things that are chipping away at our moral fibre.

Never mind men being in touch with their feelings, there should be a campaign to protect practical skills. Digging over a garden, changing a plug or a tyre, taking kids to football after a hard day’s graft. Stepping up to the plate is a quality that has been diluted by a namby-pamby society so keen to make excuses.

When he was a young lad, just about to finish school, this correspondent’s brother took a night class in welding. It has been invaluable for his lifetime’s work on the farm. Unfortunately, the tractors used in the recent demonstrations against Labour’s family farm tax can give the impression that all agricultural equipment is new and shiny. On the contrary, in everyday farming life, there is an awful lot of making do and mending. Now, when his nephew tried to follow in his footsteps, we discovered night classes are increasingly extinct. Lack of funding, health and safety and a shortage of willing teachers all given as excuses. In the past, people took the responsibility for boosting both their own mental health and job opportunities by thinking about the future and enrolling on a course to improve their skills. Now, such opportunities are all mostly gone; from holiday Spanish to cake decorating and car maintenance.

At a time when one in four children started primary school still in nappies last September, it’s fundamentally wrong that education seems so preoccupied with woke culture. Just take the primary school headmistress - the word headteacher has deliberately not been used - in the news recently for scrapping annual Easter celebrations out of respect for other religions and in the name of ‘inclusivity and diversity.’

Children may not go to church at Easter like they used to, but why shouldn’t they get the chance to learn the Christian story and enjoy activities such as decorating and rolling hard boiled eggs like the generations before them?

Oh no, don’t say, it’s a double health and safety nightmare. Both the boiling of the water and then the throwing of an object. Almost forgot, it also involves that element of competition and pressure for parents, remembering to buy the eggs and so-on.

Just me, or is modern life getting beyond a yoke?

Sarah Todd is a journalist specialising in farming and country life. Read her weekly column in Wednesday’s edition of The Yorkshire Post.