How home schooling helps me and my daughter bond, by author of Mama, a new book

Gambotto-Burke’s latest book,  Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, is honest, moving and reflective, too, but at its heart is love – because this tome follows not death, but a birth; that of her daughter.

“Our culture is one in which love is sacrificed to material gain, leading to a global epidemic of mood and behavioural disorders and, of course, to suicide,” says the author, who lives with her nine-year-old daughter,  Bethesda, on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia. “My daughter’s birth inspired me to write a game-changing book that shows us how to recover our capacity for intimacy, starting with the way we love our children.”

A series of memoirs, tips and conversations with child-care experts such as  Steve Biddulph,  Dr Laura Markham,  Stephanie Coontz and  Michel Odent, the book is a passionate exploration of what it is to be a mother in the modern age and how society as a whole is becoming dangerously desensitised. A challenge to the cultural status quo, wherein women are encouraged – bullied, even – into returning to the workplace as soon as possible after having given birth, Mama is likely to prove as controversial as  Amy Chua’s  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – especially in Hong Kong, where parenthood is outsourced en masse to poorly paid workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.