Even middle-class children are suffering from neglect

And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends?

So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we?

Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a monkey’s.

All this week, the story has been that we have the least nurtured offspring in the world: as Fathers 4 Justice staged a rooftop protest on Harriet Harman’s roof, David Cameron, a father of three, told Relate that families needed support, money, tax-breaks, but above all, time; we are bottom of the UN table for raising children; and the four children’s commissioners this week reported that the UN convention on the rights of the child doesn’t seem to apply in Britain, with one in three children living in poverty, and over a million in poor housing. The dossier documented failures in all areas — asylum, education, learning disability, smacking — but even so, it didn’t say the thing I kept waiting for: that even middle-class families with aspirational graduate parents don’t spend that much time just hanging together, chillaxin’, any more.

I’m not saying that our Jessicas and Bens are swigging alcopops on street corners, in hoodies. Of course they’re not. But there is definitely evidence that the middle classes are producing their own, quasi-feral generation of children (sorry, I simply can’t type kids), only in their own, very different, handwringingly guilt-ridden, overcompensating way.