When I decided I wanted to have a crack at getting pregnant, the first person I consulted wasn’t my husband but my mother. Would she be happy to lend a hand if I had a baby? Look after it a bit while I worked, while my husband worked (both freelance, therefore maternity/paternity leave-less, sick pay-less, holiday pay-less), because there was no way on God’s good earth we could afford London childcare fees? And that would be on top of what we might call traditional granny hours – the fun ones, the ones you choose, the ice-creams-and-park-filled ones that, given a reasonably functional, happy family dynamic, have always been counted a late perk of the parental job, a pleasure rather than a duty?

I was very lucky. My mother is a human dynamo, was two years retired, healthy as a horse and champing at the bit for another project to fill her days. A baby would do nicely. Also, I was notably inept at everything except typing, so it would not be safe for me to have sole charge of an infant. I could not disagree. I informed my husband of our decision and, a couple of years later Clomid-assisted nature provided.

Rare, you see, was the couple even back then (the baby is now 15 years old and refusing to shave), who could afford just to jump into this breeding lark without calling on an intergenerational supplementary or back-up plan.

Grandparental contributions have increasingly become a mainstay of modern childrearing. They provide, on average, ten hours a week of babysitting and their service/devotion saves UK families billions in nursery and other fees. That’s to say nothing of the mental load lifted by having a carer you can trust and who is unlikely to open the door one day to reveal her new slavering pit bull straining at a leash while her toddler charges cowered in a corner – as my best NCT friend once experienced. More recently, as the cost of living has increased, they have started ratcheting up their other contributions to family life: pensioners now give an average of £2,272 to their families a year to defray increasingly impossible expenses and a further £2,250 annually towards education costs incurred by their children and grandchildren – in total, about 17 per cent of pensioners’ annual spending.

Which is very, very, very, very kind of them indeed. But it shouldn’t be necessary. It speaks to a huge burden on multiple generations and to huge flaws in the systems that should be supporting the perpetuation of family life.

It is not a crazy ambition to want to be able to have children with your partner without having to look much beyond your own physical, emotional and fiscal capacities to do so. That is a large part – maybe even the largest part – of what being an independent adult means.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I did not just say and I do not mean that having a family is required or is proof of your bona fides as a viable human being. I’m saying that if that is a thing you want to do, it is not unreasonable to want to live in a society that does not effectively veto it if you do not have healthy, wealthy and generous relatives to lean on. Thank you for coming to my bracketed Ted talk.)

Nor – and this is equally important – should it be a crazy ambition or expectation that, once you reach retirement age you should be able to… retire. Not just from your job, but from anything else being imposed on you at great cost to yourself and to the respite from the rigours of life, which you have both earned and planned for.

This is a fair deal. This is all part of a very reasonable social contract that is now being attacked on all sides. Childcare costs, along with everything else, are sky high. And that’s if you can even get a place (ideally pitbull free, but no guarantees) at all. Avoiding them by living off one income is a more or less risible idea, unless your partner is a billionaire (and you shouldn’t be breeding with them anyway – they’re horrible).

At the same time, work is becoming harder and lasting longer. Retirement ages creep up and up, pensions are themselves more and more pathetic (sometimes I want my mother to tell me the story of how she paid into a final salary scheme as if it’s a bedtime fairy tale, other times I just want to punch walls). Mortgage terms stretch into infinity… when I think of how little I, knackered and impoverished, will be able to care for my own grandchildren (who I want SO much I cannot begin to tell you, but which insane hunger belongs to a different part of my psyche and in a different column), I could weep.

Normal human aspirations and desires are being truncated at every turn and this is unsustainable. We are borrowing from the last generation who have any resources to spare. What happens next? The government needs to start thinking clearly, acting swiftly and investing wisely in the future otherwise it, along with the rest of us, has none worth speaking of at all.