Lily Allen, mother of two daughters aged 2 and 1, has admitted she abandoned her having-it-all wife and mother lifestyle in the Cotswolds because she found her babies boring. Many, many women, very few of whom will have a career as a pop idol to return to, will recognise the sentiment with that slight constriction of the gut that comes with the memory of sheer tedium, perhaps most of all if they have rashly combined parenthood with a move to the country. You are so right, Ms Allen. Small babies can be really boring.

What makes it hard to admit this eternal truth – as every piece of research on child development emphasises – is that those early months are also extremely important. The listened-to baby whose needs are lovingly met and whose limitless appetite for exploration and experimentation is nurtured is the future happy citizen. Being a good mother is not a scam perpetrated by the patriarchy on women at a vulnerable moment in their lives. It really matters.

But the value of the first months and the importance of the role of the parent-with-care – yes, that is still mostly the mother – is only one of a whole load of messages that bombard them. It is not even the loudest nor bossiest in the post-partum environment. When women have to launch protests in order to assert the right to breastfeed in public, it is crashingly obvious that ours is a society that values neither babies nor parenthood. Boarding school-educated politicians talk about the importance of parenting and make policy that treats every adult as a taxpaying economic unit. Or a scrounger. They threaten a law criminalising emotional neglect, but fail to provide the education and support to stop it happening.

This is the same order of priorities that requires famous parents to do regular photoshoots, not to share their parenting techniques, but in order to allow informed judgment of their diet and exercise regime. The first obligation of the celebrity mother, and by implication of all mothers who have just had a baby, is to look like a woman who hasn't just had a baby.

Adding an infant into the lifestyle mix has gone from being, for most of us, the answer to the fundamental question of why we are here, to the acquisition of a status item, or at least a delightful inconvenience to be fitted in at an appropriate moment into one's real life. But no one really pays much attention to the demands of being a good parent. It requires all the qualities that seem least fashionable, mainly the capacity to hear and respond to another individual's needs before one's own. It is tough to retreat from the world of thrusting individualism and turn into a selfless, or at least a thoughtful, carer. At the moment of birth nature provides a handy hormone rush. There's nothing later, however, to ease the passage of coming home from work and transforming into a loving and gentle person who is also up for 45 minutes of peep-bo.

Maybe Allen's notorious mouthiness will get people thinking differently, perhaps even prompt a reconsideration of how to bring up baby. Allen complained that her daughters couldn't talk to her. What she didn't see was that they were still communicating. If health visiting was still universal, she would have had someone to show her how. If parenting was on the national curriculum, or the Roots of Empathy schools programme taught in every school, there would be a real understanding of why it matters and the rules that can't be broken.

Invest in, instead of cutting back on, children's centres. Extend and support parental leave better. Make sure both parents can afford to take it. And invest in the status of professional carers and the quality of childcare.

If that's a bit much for the age of austerity, at least recognise that babyhood is important as well as – sometimes – really quite boring.