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Tiernay Gearon and Rachel Cusk are bad mothers. Gearnon's sweetly candid photographs of her children were widely condemned as inadvertently pornographic. Cusk's exquisite memoir, A Life's Work, drew criticism for its ambivalent portrayal of the joys of motherhood. What are the forces being brought to bear on mothers to be perfect? Has the parent/child bond been over sentimentalised or are parents the next in line in the war of childhood. They are joined by Denise Riley, poet, writer and academic, and author of the ground-breaking War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, which examines the relationship between the natural, biological, and social aspects of motherhood.