It’s all seven-day working. And that’s progress?

Nicola Horlick, mistress of the £250 million investment fund, boasted this week that despite a life spent seducing squillionaires from Saudi Arabia to Singapore she never, ever misses a school sports day or school play. And she must attend plenty, having five children of her own, plus three stepkids by her new husband. Yet at weekends she doesn’t even have a nanny! She survives solo, indeed gladly chauffeurs hordes of lesser people’s offspring on jolly outings in her upmarket charabanc.

Put aside, for a moment, the natural desire to curl a lip at the implication that caring for one’s own children two days in seven constitutes an act of heroism. Because Ms Horlick demonstrates a new privilege, one available these days only to the securely affluent: the power to ring-fence 48 hours of undisturbed family life from the working grind.

For lesser players, weekends are no longer sacrosanct. Fathers surreptitiously check BlackBerries at the sandpit, pull out laptops with a sigh on Sunday nights. Or send a put-upon partner stomping off to another family lunch alone. Farther still down the food chain, a mother must leave for the Sunday shift at the supermarket checkout, a father gladly banks a whole weekend’s overtime. In 2004, the parents of 4.5 million children under the age of 16 regularly worked through the weekend – the majority from low-income families. That figure can only have grown.

Do we really want nurseries to open at weekends? It is an uncomfortable picture, toddlers dropped off on a Sunday morning, picked up at dusk. The day when they should be kicking a ball or sitting down to a proper meal with their parents is spent listlessly fingerpainting with virtual strangers. But this is what parents want, according to research by the Daycare Trust. Or rather it is, increasingly, what they need.

Whatever the orphanage-like horror of seven-day institutional childcare, it might just be better than the ad hoc weekend provision at present. Better than children left with neighbours or dubious friends or to roam the TV channels or streets alone. Local authorities are already considering weekend opening for children’s centres and late-hours nurseries for parents on evening shifts. A state babysitting service has been piloted in Scotland, so parents can leave sleeping infants not with flaky teenage girls but registered, police-checked council operatives.

So this is progress. This is what an economic boom feels like. Let’s hear it for our high-octane 24/7 consumer paradise. Who needs leisure and respite, let alone those old-fangled saddo things, hobbies? Who cares that the right to a weekend break involved the most hard-fought of struggles? Chinese unions are battling for workers’ entitlement to a single day off. Yet we have willingly surrendered our gains and allowed the free market to surge into every vacant second of our lives.

When I say liberalising the Sunday trading law in 1994 was a grave error, I realise I will be consigned to the categories of creaky God-botherer or romanticiser of my childhood Seventies Sabbaths, empty of all possibility beyond Songs of Praise and mooching in the park. How much better that we can now parade through gleaming malls, buy a sofa, a car or a holiday at any moment we choose. Late on Sunday afternoons, when I realise there’s no bread for Monday’s packed lunches, I don’t rail at my poor planning but at Mr Sainsbury. How dare you close early – I want my loaf now!

How strange then on holiday to see that the French, Spanish and Germans somehow manage to purchase bread within limited opening hours, then clear off home to their families. How do they do it? But then these are not beneficiaries of the British economic miracle. Let us pity and despise these shirking, clockwatching losers. They might have long family lunches and evening strolls – but just check out our GDP.

Oxford Street is impassable on a Sunday. British families shop together, lions teaching their cubs to hunt on the open savannahs of HMV and Accessorize. We seldom think of those serving us or cleaning the stores after we’ve gone home, or their children or how they might be spending their Sunday afternoons.

Middle-class parents will be horrified at the notion of weekend nurseries. But then, mostly, they won’t need them. Work-life balance is now an all-party mantra. And while all parents of under-6s can request flexi-hours, in many firms only the more secure employees feel confident enough to ask; besides only 48 per cent of British firms will agree, compared with 90 per cent in Germany and Sweden. Similarly it is those employees with power who can skip a morning meeting for a child’s assembly.

My sons’ state primary has an excellent, low-cost after-school club. Look inside at the children doing crafts or out in the little garden learning to plant vegetables and they are almost all black, their parents working long and hard and, doubtlessly, ill-paid. The middle-class white mothers pick up their own children, or fathers work condensed hours to make the school yard once a week. Or they send childminders or au pairs.

Yet weekend childcare is nothing new for the very rich. On Sunday mornings in Kensington Gardens tiny, immaculately clad French and American children are led to the park by Filipina ladies. Meanwhile, Maman and Mommy service their hedge-fund husbands, get a lie-in, take a yoga class, or just buy their way out of long, boring, messy hours of why-mummy-why. Certainly no one employs a weekend nanny so that they can leave at dawn to clean an office block or work a Sunday shift at Dixons.

The likelihood of a generation of children raised in weekend nurseries should be a moment to reflect upon what lies ahead. All those endless surveys that put British children last in international rankings – least likely to eat with parents, take exercise, most likely to watch excessive amounts of TV, drink alcohol, take drugs, be unhappy or insecure about the future – lead to one conclusion: our children want us.

A report this week concluded that boys who join violent teenage gangs did so because these male peers assuaged their “father hunger”. And our children have “parent hunger”, they need the best of us, relaxed and playful, able to tell our bad jokes and family stories, pass on our skills and passions, free from work, not dragging them around shopping malls. You shouldn’t need to be a city supermother to claim a work-free weekend.