I HAVE no real position on Cheryl – once a Tweedy, then a Cole, then a something else when she married a French bloke. But to establish context, there’s a minor respect for the success the council estate Geordie squeezed from the lemon of pop industry via Girls Aloud and then reality TV. (Although her conviction for skelping a night club toilet attendant left a serious mark on the positives.)

However, the tiny monogamous performer has opened the flood gates of debate with her announcement this week that she will use a sperm donor to have more children.

My first thought? “Fill your boots, Cheryl.” You admit you pick the wrong men, and indeed your marriage to pop star Liam Payne, ten years younger, lasted as long as it took to count up One Direction’s hits. You have the money. And single women or female couples can do the job of a female-male partnership.

In fact, my thoughts on single mothers couldn’t be more clear, particularly at this moment with my 84-year-old mum in hospital for the past six weeks. Even now, her delirium-struck mind still abounds with selflessness as she manages to throw a worried look in my direction and say, “Just go home, you’re looking awfy tired.” And, “Are you working too hard?” Also, for some inexplicable reason: “Do you need any money?”

Absent of a father from the age of 11, my mother fulfilled every role imaginable: cook, seamstress, launderer, sums teacher, shepherd, encourager.

But a debate on Cheryl’s self-partnering baby plans on BBC Scotland’s Kaye Adams radio show made me rethink Cheryl’s plan. Edinburgh University sociologist Amy Andrada made an argument for men being non-vital to the development of a child, “because women can easily pick up the traits of men.” What? Women who bring up families without male support can do a wonderful job but they can’t be men any more that men can act as women. Being a man or a woman is a way of being. You can’t suddenly learn to replicate the behavioural patterns of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, nor deny that the X-Y chromosome count counts for nothing.

Peggy Drexler, a former gender scholar at Stanford University, wrote Raising Boys Without Men, in which she argued that boys now see their mothers stand up for themselves; argue; face authority. “All those qualities that we have traditionally linked with men, women have them, too.”

Yes, qualities, skills. But these aren’t traits. It’s a given that having a wasted, wasteful father around who wreaks havoc in families is better off out of the picture. However, let’s push sociological theories aside and remember that dads have different sensibilities.

I remember a period, aged 10, of getting into too many fights in a new school and my mother having a blue fit each time and talking about “expulsion” and “shame on the family.” My dad’s reaction? He would throw me a sly glance and say, “Did you win?”

I didn’t see him again after the age of 11, but I did miss this testosterone-fuelled reasoning over the years. It was wonderful to have a mother who agonised over every scuffed knee, but a dad who would say the equivalent of, “Grow a couple, son” had been just as important.

You see, a dad is sorely missed when your mum tells you that you don’t need a razor to remove the bum fluff on your face so full it could fill a scatter cushion.

A dad is sorely missed when it comes to a 15-year-old’s first date, which your mother sees as a version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner being played out in her head, when the reality is more Mary Poppins innocence.

And a dad is seriously missed when you have that first beer, that rite-of-passage shared experience which mums tend to view as a sure descent into alcoholism.

And what about when home conversation overflows with oestrogen? A dad would have an implicit understanding of why a young man gets all fidgety when talk in an all-female house all too often turns to soft furnishings.

The science arguments for dads can’t be denied either. Researchers from Princeton University have argued that the stress suffered by children with absent fathers was the cause of their shortened telomeres (the vital pieces of DNA that protect cells.) Having an absent father through divorce shortened telomeres by 14 per cent.

That seems to make sense, because mothers and fathers are yin and yang.

So, Cheryl take your time. Try and choose the right man this time. Because if you don’t you could be denying a little person the chance to one day ask, “Dad, what was it like when you were a boy?”