Attacking Caroline Berg Eriksen for her post

ALL RIGHT ladies: hands up if you looked like Caroline Berg Eriksen four days after giving birth? In fact, hands up if you have ever looked like this whether you've have had a baby or not.

Didn't think so.

As the impeccably well-maintained wife of a Norwegian footballer, and a well-known health and fitness and blogger to boot, this selfie of Berg Eriksen is not exactly an accurate depiction of the average post-natal experience.

And clearly she knows it. Why else would she have felt compelled to post photographic proof of her super-taut abs only days after exiting the maternity ward?

Some call it bragging, while others squirm at her shameless exhibitionism. But does it make her a bad mother? Because that's the not so thinly veiled accusation being levelled at Berg Eriksen from her many critics.

'Shouldn't she be cuddling her baby?' sniped a reader on a British parenting site yesterday, echoing similar conclusions drawn by numerous commenters in assuming her svelte figure is incompatible with caring for a newborn.

I'm going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess her baby daughter was possibly sleeping while Mummy played Instagram show and tell. Or perhaps - here's a revolutionary idea! - safely in the arms of her father.

For most of us mere mortals, managing to wash our hair and get further than two distracted sips into a cup of tea is the best we can manage in the sleep-deprived, round-the-clock-feeding-machine days of early motherhood.

And shame on anyone who leaves a new mum feeling like a failure for not looking like a lingerie-clad model - a patently absurd proposition given 98 per cent of the general population don't look like that on even the best of the days.

But slamming the super-fit and genetically freakish likes of Berg Eriksen is merely another form of judgment - and mothers are forced to contend with far too much of that already.

Just as a housewife in Kellyville is entitled to stay in her cereal-splattered tracksuit for weeks on end, a WAG in Norway is entitled to flaunt her flat stomach in lacy underwear.

Peddling sanctimony is no better than trading in insecurity. Both might sell magazines and generate hysteria on social media, but neither approach does a mother - be she size 6 or 16 - any favours.