About 25 or 30 years back, I had been horrified to read an article about a family where two small children were taken away from their mother because she had not kept her house tidy. This was in Norway or Sweden (I forget which). A woman with two small children very often does not have time to tidy up her house. I remember my house when my son was about 5 years old and my daughter was an infant. I did not have any domestic help and it was all I could manage to cook a meal of sorts, send my son to school and take care of my daughter. Tidying the house was last on my priority list. If I had chosen to spend time tidying my house I would have to stop cooking or bathing the baby or some such more important task. (in my age group, husbands did not consider any of this their business)
In most of our households, very small children sleep with was their parents. In fact, when one of my relatives made her infant son sleep in another bedroom alone, I thought that was ill treatment of the baby. I believed (and still do), that a small baby needs to be near its mother at night.
It is ridiculous for governments to decide how someone should bring up his own child unless the parent is actually hurting the child in a manner universally perceived to be harmful.
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