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Yvonne Roberts says there is no such thing as a perfect child, even if it's a designer baby.

Shahana and Raj Hashmi have won the right to screen their IVF embryos to ensure that their new baby is a genetic match for their son Zain, who suffers from a rare blood disorder. The decision has inevitably triggered a debate on designer babies - children created to generate spare parts for their siblings.

One of the issues raised is the nature of the relationship between the Hashmis and their new child. How will they explain their decision to conceive? And what if the new child fails to save Zain?

The Hashmis will have to exercise a degree of emotional honesty that patently does not exist in many families. How many social workers, for instance, have been faced with the conundrum of a mother with three daughters, each allegedly raised in exactly the same way, two of whom have grown up as a credit while the third is destructive of herself and her parent?

At the risk of simplification, among the possible causes might be bullying or sexual abuse. What is is less widely broached is what psychotherapist Rozsika Parker has called: "The experience of maternal ambivalence."

In Torn in Two,¹ she argues that love and hate are normal ingredients in a mother's love for her child but society represses all mention of the negative - sometimes at an enormous cost. Parker argues that it's not ambivalence that is the problem, but how mothers manage the guilt and anxiety it provokes. And what happens when hate dominates, disguised as love?

Sometimes, this maternal hatred is based on the fact that the child is too like the mother; another cause may be because the parent sees her own critical mother in her offspring. In fairy tales, Parker points out, magic intervenes on behalf of the hated child. In real life, the child is defenceless, portrayed as bad.

Psychotherapist Melanie Klein wrote: "We so much dread hatred in ourselves that we employ one of our strongest defences by putting it on to other people - to project it." So, the mother perceives her child as her "malevolent opponent".

Inadvertently, the Hashmis have underscored that what's required in all families is a more open and less idealised account of modern day motherhood. Long before IVF designer babies become the norm, we were already deeply wounded by the myth of the perfect mother and child.

¹ Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, Virago, 1995