Kirsty Smith: Are stressed mums really the 'latest drunken hell-raisers'?

Do mothers really have pick-me-ups following the after school pick up? Photo / iStock

Forget rugby club boozers, it turns out that stressed mums are the latest drunken hell-raisers - swapping tea after school for a glass (or three) of wine. I know, I know. It sounds hard to believe. Whoever has time for a cup of tea? Is that the one we supposedly sip while the baby sleeps, the children quietly do some colouring in and fairies pick congealed raisins out of the coir matting in the hall? Yeah, right.

What I want to know is where the hell are all these hard-drinking mums? After dropping my daughter off for her first day of school I headed out with friends to Caffe Nero to celebrate. With cappuccinos. One person ordered a muffin.

They must be out there though, because the alco-data in question comes from surveys which we parents have filled in ourselves. Those of us with kids, it turns out, are admitting to rolling round drunk at 4pm, and devil take the hindmost. To which I plead: can't the statistics take into account all that time when we were pregnant and breastfeeding and not drinking a solitary, measly, teeny-weeny drop?

By God though, if it really is true, who can deny that parents deserve a drink? Parenting is hard work! I don't normally pay much attention to advice. But when I was pregnant every single person I met told me that parenting was going to be hard work. Then I had my babies and, wow! It turned out they were right. That was particularly annoying, of course, because I had to deal with their rightness while knackered and, naturally, stone cold sober.

What those good souls with their sage advice didn't tell me, though, was that looking after a newborn is the easy part. Nappies and gurgling and midnight feeds? A doddle. Meanwhile, school-age children are easy too. For starters they're someone else's problem for most of the day. If the stress of motherhood was really driving women to drink we wouldn't be waiting to hit the bottle until after school pick-up, we'd all have the gin fitted upside down in the kitchen like they do in bars. As soon as the kids scuttled off to class dressed in one welly, three skirts and a pair of Ann Summers kitten ears, there would be no fuss with corkscrews - we could just reach for another shot. Or a double.

No, it's the toddler years where parents most need the love and support of a glass of pinot noir. Personally I'm shocked that mums with toddlers aren't constantly rocking up wasted for Rhythm & Jiggle at the church hall, pelting the vicar with value custard creams and chanting: "Strip! Strip! Strip!"

But amazingly we don't. Sure, we do like to make a lot of jokes about "Wine O'Clock" as our offspring launch into truly fantastic meltdowns because we have the audacity to serve toast that is actually toasted (bread, Sweetie, you want bread). On social media, such tales will prompt friends to send messages telling me to pour a drink. The technologically adept may even manage a bottle emoji. I accept these virtual glasses of wine gracefully, in the spirit in which they are intended -as shorthand for a virtual hug.

Certainly, the idea of drinking after school is tempting. But madness. Everyone knows that the hours from 3.30pm until bedtime are when parents really need their wits about them. It takes all my mental capacity to Google the answers to Nina and The Neurons on CBeebies at 4.30pm. Then there's dinner to distribute, followed by removal of dinner from the floor, the walls and the children - all before the bell rings for round one of bedtime.

In our house we like to wait until we have made at least one attempt at getting them off to sleep before we crack open the wine. And this is the important point. Call me crazy but I like to relax and enjoy my booze. And I have yet to source a bottle whose label suggests: "A hint of gooseberry on the nose. Serve with a small child poking carrot sticks in your eyes. Or fish." The delicate balance of juniper and hand-selected botanicals in the perfect G&T is not ideally paired with an argument about how many episodes of Dora the Explorer a three-year-old is allowed to watch before they have to go to bed.

So, though macrame may be easier to boast about when sloshed, boozing before the kids get to sleep is a no-no for this stressed mother.

Afterwards, however? That's another matter entirely.