"It's my job to look after them"

It is. I'm not going to argue with the job. I'd argue with the definition, because "look after" has quietly come to mean "do", and it used to mean something wider.

Looking after a child includes feeding them, keeping them warm, keeping them safe, and getting them to school with a bag. It also includes the thing that's harder to see, which is arranging matters so that one day they don't need you to. A parent who does the shoes at four is looking after Ava. A parent who's still doing them at seven is looking after this morning, and the cost is falling on a version of Ava who hasn't arrived yet. Both feel like care. Only one is care for the whole child, including the future one.

There's research suggesting that the letting go starts earlier than you'd think. Annie Bernier, Stephanie Carlson and Natasha Whipple followed eighty mothers and infants, measuring at twelve to fifteen months how much the mother supported the child's own attempts at a task, alongside her sensitivity and how much she talked about what the child was thinking. At eighteen and twenty-six months they tested the children's executive functions, the early forms of working memory and stopping yourself. Of the three parenting measures, support for the child's own attempts was the strongest predictor of the toddler's skills at both ages, independent of the child's general ability and the mother's education. It's eighty families, and the effects are the modest kind that this sort of study finds. But the measure that mattered most wasn't warmth or attention. It was whether the parent let the one-year-old have a go.

Nobody thinks of that as neglect. It's the thing you do with a baby without noticing, holding the spoon near the mouth and letting the baby take it. Somewhere between the spoon and the shoe it gets lost, and I think it gets lost because the jobs get more consequential. A baby with yoghurt on its face is fine. A four-year-old with shoes on the wrong feet at the school gate reflects on you. The looking after starts to include looking after how it looks.

So I'd put it this way. Looking after them includes looking after who they'll be, and who they'll be is made of the jobs they were allowed to do badly. A parent who does everything is doing a great deal. It's the wrong list.