There is no "childcare crisis". We have fewer children per couple now than we did in previous decades. It's not as if we've started having them in litters of eight and haven't got enough hands to deal with them.

As a reader of newspapers, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The phrase "the childcare crisis" has now been repeated so many times that it has acquired the status of fact. And the cost of childcare is always "spiralling".

In fact, the cost of childcare is only "spiralling" if you consider that the work your mother did in rearing you cost nothing and was worth nothing. It cost your mother a lot and it probably dearly cost your parents' lifestyle; on any economic balance sheet worth having, it would have been counted.

If you think this is going to be an ode to the stay-at-home mother of yesteryear, you're mistaken. It was, of course, absolutely ridiculous that the carer of children was always the wife and never the husband. Unfortunately, however, the great social upheaval which is being caused as women claim their place outside the home has been accompanied by no great response on the part of men to home duties. It is succeeding, instead, in delegating the task of childcare to another set of undervalued women.

I am lucky enough to be able to afford to employ a fully-qualified childminder who looks after my son at home. Roughly two days a week, he shares her with a slightly older girl, which is a challenge for the minder, but wonderfully enriching for my son.

I know what my childminder does is harder than what I do. Yet I am repeatedly asked in combative tones how much she is paid. So-called liberal friends will quibble about paying a young minder's tax, although not to do so would mean she would have no maternity benefit herself.

The reason why people consider the cost of childcare so intolerable is surely not even because women's work isn't valued. It is because children are valued so little. If that weren't the case, subsidised creches would not be proposed as the cure to all our woes. Babies need the one-to-one attention of a face that does not go away, toddlers need one minder most of the time. Most psychologists seem agreed on this; some, like Penelope Leach, are vocal about it. In truth, people seem to know this instinctively. If not, why do pictures of creches always show pre-school children busy at play, not babies lying in a line of cots?

An approved creche should have one minder for three babies, although, in reality, this is often not the case. In Children First (1995), Leach quotes research which found that even when the one-minder-to-three-babies rule was adhered to, one minder was often cleaning or organising, while her colleague minded six babies.

What matters most to babies and toddlers is, of course, not how many children a minder has on her hands, but that she (nearly always she) will not go away. No creche can guarantee that; few supply it. Staff turnover can be high, and staff is often moved around within a creche.

Creche places for every baby in the land would, however, look great on the kind of balance-sheet most of our economists and politicians favour. Three babies to one badly-paid woman? Those are childcare costs which are not spiralling, but are going through the floor. Leaving all that money to spend on important things, like property.

I know the Budget "bottled out" of giving working parents a childcare payment or tax relief on childcare. Instead, the politically safe option of a universal increase in child benefit was favoured, which handed money to people like me who were doing fine without it, even before you count what I gained through tax individualisation.

It is not as if this could be seen as Government recognition of the right of babies to one-to-one childcare, however. There is £290 million in the National Development Plan for childcare, but it won't go towards funding measures which would revolutionise our children's lives. (The Swedes, for example, get a year-and-a-half of leave on 90 per cent of salary after the birth of a child, and have the right to 60 days' leave a year to care for a sick child - they take, on average, 10 or 12, as many as we typically take, except we have to pretend to be sick ourselves.)

Instead, it will mostly go towards funding group care for children in order to get women into the workplace. If there really were the political will to answer the needs of children, the priority would not be group care for babies and toddlers, but rather a couple of hours a day of free pre-school education for all children between their third birthday and their first day at school, when they are ready to benefit from it.

If you're reading this having just struggled to and from an expensive creche because both of you have to work to service the mortgage - well, you're probably not reading any more. You're probably ritualistically eating the newspaper, barking, between mouthfuls, about middle-class cows who think everyone can afford the services of their own childminders.

In fact, if you have more than one child, a Dublin creche will cost you as much as a childminder in your own home. Even if you have only one child, having your child minded in the home of (almost invariably) a mother who wants to stay home herself will cost you least of all. But supporting such home-based childcare would look too messy to our political strategists and, indeed, to many parents, who have accepted the prevailing idea of what's best.

Parents and children who are genuinely socially disadvantaged need all the help they can get. But whether State-funded creches are the answer in themselves is at least debatable, when more flexible, creative options, such as long maternity/paternity leaves for increasingly valued parents and support for home-based childcare, could improve babies' and toddlers' lives so much.

Meanwhile, more and more Irish parents learn the hypnotic mantra that they both have to work full-time because of property prices, that creches are the only affordable childcare. When, in fact, we have built our own prison: property prices are only that high because we pay them; and it is our choice that babies and toddlers should be poorer when we have never been richer.

Maev-Ann Wren is on leave.