Have you ever, when other children have come for a playdate after school with your own, sneaked a peep inside the visiting child’s book bag to see which reading level they are on and compare?

“If someone doesn’t admit to looking in a playdate’s book bag I’d suspect they were fibbing,” says Meg Sanders, whose new book, The Madness of Modern Families, which she co-wrote with Annie Ashworth, is subtitled, The Race to Compete With Other Bl**dy Parents. It is a light-hearted look at the way contemporary, especially middle-class, families deal with all aspects of parenting, from food to holidays, and will become a BBC TV series next year.

The two authors are sitting at the kitchen table in Ashworth’s cottage near Warwick. They point out that parents now are dealing with issues our own parents never imagined – internet pornography, mobile phones, computer games. As Ashworth says, all our parents had to worry about when we were young “was us drinking vodka behind a hedge”.

Some of us react by tutoring them up to the eyeballs or supervising them 24 hours a day. And, perhaps as a result, there are those among us who’ve lost the plot. It is this type of parent they are gently poking fun at in their book.

It is all parents who have come in for a hammering in recent weeks, with the Children’s Society and members of the great and the good painting a bleak picture of modern childhood, in an open letter to a newspaper. Modern parenting, they say, is leading to depression among children, and they are making Ashworth and Sanders rather cross. The two of them believe that, while a lot of what these reports are saying is valid – too much junk food, pressure of schoolwork – we’re not all terrible all the time.

“The reports make out every one of us Could Do Better,” says Ashworth, “They’re criticising all of us, including those who are doing their best. There are Pullman and Morpurgo being highfaluting… I feel uncomfortable with that because they’ve made a packet from parents who’ve bought their books in droves precisely because they are good parents and want their children to enjoy reading.” “It’s all so doomy and serious,” Sanders says. “In fact, many children have more opportunities than ever.”

Sanders, 47, worked for many years as a French translator, then edited children’s books. It was when she was pregnant with Harriet and James, her 12-year-old twins, that she met Ashworth at an antenatal class. “She seemed very organised,” says Ashworth. “She’d found some wonderful maternity bras. We sort of got together, writing-wise.”

Ashworth, 43, is divorced from the father of her three sons who are 13, 12 and 9. She started out as a journalist on Woman’s Journal, and moved to Warwickshire because of her husband’s work as a BBC engineer. Asked why she has stayed since parting from him, she points to Sanders and says, smiling, “Because of her!”

The two authors are like an old married couple, in the best sense, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing at each other’s jokes. They have written several non-fiction books together, as well as four novels – under the name of Annie Sanders – focusing on the lives of women of their age. “Chick lit it ain’t,” says Ashworth. “More hen lit!” Their second, Goodbye, Jimmy Choo, was a bestseller. They are an excellent advertisement for co-writing. Although they take responsibility for different characters in the novels and do the writing separately, they meet to discuss ideas and are constantly on the phone.

“We’ve been working together for five or six years,” says Ashworth. “For some time we’d roared with laughter about aspects of parenting that you don’t even talk about with friends – such as how well or not your child is doing – because there’s always an agenda.”

“I feel the reason parents are so barking is that we’ve been deluded into thinking that research, and throwing money at problems, will solve things,” says Sanders. “If you approach parenthood as a project, then you’re very ill-prepared for the random nature of it all.”

Ashworth reckons we are the most inexperienced generation of parents ever, perhaps because we’ve not been surrounded by children as previous generations were. “Two generations back, if every baby survived and you did as well, you were lucky. Now we expect pregnancies to be successful and to occur when we want them, and to return to work three weeks after the birth the same person we were.”

Asked what they believe drives the madness of modern parenting, Ashworth and Sanders reply it is often vicarious. If one’s child scores four A stars and plays four instruments and speaks three languages, “it doesn’t half make the parent look good”. Ashworth is anxious to point out that a lot of it “is a class thing – we’re not talking about people who genuinely need help. Parenting manuals aren’t on the whole bought by parents who need them, but by the worried well”.

Sanders cites Saturday mornings as the essence of parenting madness. “Grey-faced parents, including myself, rushing from one cultural pursuit to the next: cello, guitar, orchestra, drama and piano.”

Sanders and Ashworth are modest about their own achievements as mothers. Ashworth says she hopes she is a “good enough” mum; Sanders thinks of herself as “mixed” and “sometimes all right”.

“With The Madness of Modern Families, we’ve put our heads above the parapet,” says Sanders. “We’d have failed if we’d come across as dogmatic. There are enough experts. All we wanted to do was say we f***ed up, has anyone else? And to open the debate.”

Are you one of the bl**dy parent types? Check the profiles:
The Craft Mummy
Too Posh to Push
Eco Mummy
The Foodie Parent
Helicopter Mum
The "Been There Done That"
The PTA Parent
Designer Parents
The Tate Parent
View all the profiles

The Madness of Modern Families by Annie Ashworth and Meg Sanders, published by Hodder & Stoughton, is available from BooksFirst priced £11.69 (RRP £12.99), free p&p on 0870 160 8080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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