Pierced ears, jelly shoes, egg and chips for dinner, local accents, ITV, Barbie, package holidays, Angel Delight, American television shows, eating in the street and playing with children from council estates: according to a hilariously telling thread on the parenting website mumsnet, these were the top pet hates of snobbish middle-class parents in the 1970s and 1980s.

Oh, how we laugh, and how we heap scorn on such discriminatory commandments: can you imagine any right-thinking parent telling his or her child today that there is anything wrong with regional accents, when they are pretty much a prerequisite for a job in broadcasting?

But the Angel Delight thing you can sort of understand. Full of dreadful sugar, isn’t it? And the Barbie ban — not because she is, as one mum put it, “an American slut” but because she has unrealistic body proportions and might give our daughters eating disorders.

In her book No Two Alike, Judith Rich Harris, an American psychologist, writes that children just want to fit into the popular culture in which they are being raised, which might not be quite what their parents have in mind.

“In the long run, it is what happens to them outside the parental home that makes them turn out the way they do,” she says. And while most parents know this instinctively, we carry on resignedly making arbitrary rules, labelling things “good” or “bad” with a randomness that reflects our prejudices but baffles our children.

As parents we haven’t really thought through why we are snobby about certain things. Professor Martin Weller, of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University, has taken the trouble to question one of his particular pet hates. He says: “Before I had my child, I used to be judgmental about kids sitting there with Game Boys. Recently my daughter and her cousin went out with us to a restaurant: they were sending each other messages and images on their Nintendo DSs, and people were giving us looks of disapproval. But if they had been sitting there with paper and pencils, swapping pictures, that would have been OK. I don’t have that snobbery any more.”

Another self-aware snob is my friend Sharon, who is sniffy about her daughter reading books that she describes as “prepubescent girly sleepover literature” (ie, Jacqueline Wilson, a common literary snob target). Sharon admits that her snobbery has backfired. “I told Molly [aged 11] to read Go Ask Alice instead, because it is a modern classic. I had forgotten that it includes lengthy diary entries about the teenage character performing sexual favours to feed her drug habit.” Many parents refer to their snobbery in inverted commas — as long as you are aware of it and poke fun at it, that’s OK. Katy Evans-Bush, a poet and the mother of three teenagers, says: “It is snobbery when other people do it, but when I do it I am maintaining decent standards.”

One focus of her disdain is reality TV. “I make them turn it off,” she says. “I think it represents all the worst things about contemporary living: laziness, prurience, lack of content. I want my kids to be cultured individuals.”

She adds that she has been on the wrong side of other people’s middle-class snobberies: “I apparently gave several neighbourhood kids their first biscuits — the poor little mites had only been allowed organic rice cakes.”

Food-focused parental snobbery existed long before Jamie Oliver damned the Turkey Twizzler, but he has helped to validate it on health grounds. So perhaps it is fair enough that Caroline Green, a health and science journalist and mother of two boys, should condemn Fruit Shoots and Cheese Strings as “the work of the Devil” and admit that she pities children who are given “rubbish” snacks. “I don’t think it’s snobbery, just wanting them not to eat c**p,” she says. So is it snobbery or good, old-fashioned competitiveness?

Jane Sandeman, chairwoman of the Institute of Ideas parents’ forum, is clear: “You judge yourself as a parent by comparing yourself with other parents. So you can tell yourself ‘I’m a better parent than she is because I give my kids organic carrots and don’t let them watch the Disney Channel’.”

Top Ten snob hates

1 Backwards (or forwards) baseball caps.
2 White middle-class kids using Jamaican patois.
3 Eating dinner in front of the telly.
4 Kids with Nike logos shaved into their hair.
5 Kids with bad phone manners: “Is Kitty there?”
6 Obese parents bringing their obese offspring for meals at KFC.
7 Computers.
8 Babies in football-team shirts.
9 Kids and parents who like the same music and go to the same gigs.
10 Top Gear

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