If mum smiles, the whole family smiles with her: OPINION

You know the sort; perennially cheerful, handy in the kitchen and usually seen wearing a tight-fitting pair of trousers, with a set of keys and a mobile phone clipped to the waistband.

They are not ashamed to parrot this god-awful saying, one which was abandoned by everybody else back in the late 1980s, along with avocado bathroom fittings.

There are millions of chaps who wouldn’t dream of admitting that they always do as they are told at home.

While it isn’t a particularly macho admission to make, there is now academic evidence which appears to show there is much truth in the phrase. Work conducted by the Marriage Foundation has shown families are happier when mum has a smile on her face.

Using data gathered by the Millennium Cohort study, which involved 13,000 couples being tracked since the turn of this century, it showed that if a mother was happy then her children would be less likely to develop mental health issues. Content women enjoy a good relationship with their family, including their partners.

The founder of the Marriage Foundation, a former High Court judge called Sir Paul Coleridge, was quoted as saying the ingredient to keeping the whole family beaming could only come from the ‘mother figure’.

The same study found the mental wellbeing of dads had no influence on his offspring.

Toeing the line at home has never been cool but it is an alien concept in this era of would-be Adonises, who spend more time working on their abs than their forebears ever did propping up the bar of their local hostelry.

Then you have blokes like me: over-nourished 40-somethings who are happy to do ‘their fair share’ but never quite get it right.

There are some things we can never do as well as the missus – soothing an injured child for example. ‘Get up you big Jessie’ are not words any child wishes to hear.

Modern families come in all shapes and sizes but we have to face the fact that a happy mum makes life easier for everybody.