Anne Hathaway is giving up booze for 18 years to be a better mother? I can’t drink to that

Anne Hathaway has given up drinking. Not for ever, just for 18 years, while her son – now two – is under her roof. She doesn’t want him to see her drunk, because “I don’t like the way I do it” and she doesn’t want to do nursery drop-offs hungover, which will make it difficult for her to make friends, but she is American and they do things differently there.

An elaborate architecture of absolutism has built up around parenting, with alcohol as its core scaffolding. You might think: “Wait a second, it’s not the end of the world for a child to see its parent being raucous or even just sitting on the sofa rather than tidying.” But the arguments marshalled against you would be severe: figures on the negative psycho-social impact of an alcoholic parent; analysis of addiction and how it interrupts attachment; figures on what counts as a binge; how people who think they are social drinkers are actually functioning alcoholics.

One of the arguments used in favour of abstinence is that people underestimate how much they drink or how much counts as a unit; they cannot be trusted. You can use up a lot of life battling this, but the interesting thing is what happens to the noncombatants. The absolute harm of alcohol abuse is so self-evident that your reasonable parent, standing at the sidelines, who used to like having a skinful every third Friday, would prefer not to be anywhere near the contested zone.

This makes collective parenting – the principles we all agree on – overly altruistic and idealised, while actual parenting – the stuff we do – goes underground, becomes individual and atomised. It is nothing short of a disaster – not for children, but for social cohesion.

Parenting, including drunk parenting, is a tremendous bond, a leveller, a source of shared amusement; you fail, you try again, you fail better. Kids notice every shortcoming. I was reading my son a book the other day in which someone drinks themselves to death on a bottle of whisky (Day of the Triffids, thanks for asking). He asked me: “Can you die from too much alcohol?” I said: “Sure, but you’d have to drink a hell of a lot.” And he replied: “How come you’re still alive?” But child rearing is a solitary business if you do it in the Hathaway style, and only perfection can speak its name. It’s not Hathaway’s fault, by the way. I blame late capitalism, for reasons I will explain another day.