Being a mother is apparently not like it was in the good old days.

Today’s parents yearn for the golden age that their own mothers enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers found.

Mothers have less time to themselves and feel under greater pressure to juggle work and family life than the previous generation.

As a result, 88 per cent said they felt guilty about the lack of time they spent with their children.

The survey of 1,000 mothers also found that more than a third said they had less time to themselves than their mothers did – just three hours a week or 26 minutes a day.

And 64 per cent said this was because they felt they ‘had’ to go out to work, while nearly a third (29 per cent) said they were under constant pressure to be the ‘perfect mother’, the report found.

Other findings showed social networking and parenting websites, as well as technology such as Skype, were important in providing help and support among female communities.

Kate Fox, of the Social Issues Research Centre, which conducted the survey for Procter & Gamble, said: ‘With increasing pressure on mothers to work a “double shift” – to be the perfect mother as well as a wage-earner – support networks are more important than ever.’

It comes as a separate report examining childcare in the leading industrialised nations found that working mothers in Britain spend just 81 minutes a day caring for their children as a ‘primary activity’.

Mothers who stay at home, on the other hand, manage twice as much time – more than two and a half hours – looking after their offspring, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Critics say the pressure on women to work long hours, and leave their offspring in the hands of nurseries or childminders, is putting the well-being of their children at risk.

The study also reveals that, despite the fact that more and more modern mothers go out to work, the burden of childcare still falls on them - even if their husband is not in work.

A father who is not in work tends to spend just 63 minutes a day looking after his child - 18 minutes less than a mother who goes out to work.

Working fathers spare less than three quarters of an hour with their children.

(Read by Nelly Min. Nelly Min is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)