If you manage to get to the bottom of this article without breaking off to locate a lost Frisbee or build a den for your children, congratulations. It is possible that you are already a fan of benign neglect — the concept of doing parenting but not, crucially, doing too much. Benign neglect is about being around without actually being available. It’s about redressing the balance of family life — in such a way that every member is periodically entitled to the last Magnum.

The emphasis is on the benign bit, mind you, not the neglect. It’s the difference between a benign tumour and a malignant one. And that’s a big difference. No one is advocating serious neglect here. Meet the needs of your offspring but don’t pander to their every whim. Feed, clothe and love them, yes, just don’t go to Thorpe Park (for the fifth time) on Sunday when you’d rather watch the tennis.

In reality, most of us are finding lost Frisbees when we’d sooner read the paper. We dash round Sainsbury’s at midnight to free our weekends for outings to soft-play places where the children have fun while we drink bad coffee and wonder where our lives went. We buy pointless plastic to keep them happy, ferry them to football and music lessons, play with them . . . But are we doing too much?

Maybe we should take some tips from our own parents. Seventies parents didn’t have kids to place them at the centre of their universe, they had them because that’s what you did — and then you got on with Artexing the living roomceiling or whipping up some Angel Delight. You didn’t try to work and then get a nutritious meal on the table. Why would you, when Findus had invented the crispy pancake and they were on offer at Bejam? It was still possible to go to the pub on a Saturday lunchtime while the kids amused themselves in a locked car with a Coke and a packet of Golden Wonder. And, in an era when a man walking down the street was just a man and not a paedophile, you could turf them outside to make their own fun.

Benign neglect has benefits for the whole family. You will feel less stressed and resentful. Your child will become more independent. It’s a simple concept, this idea of being mildly unresponsive to our offspring, so why do we struggle with it? Perhaps it’s because society has got the message that children shouldn’t be shoved up chimneys. As a result, we’re now taking parenting very seriously. We’ve got a library of manuals, Supernanny on TV and a gazillion child-oriented attractions within a 20-minute drive.

Another cause for our reticence is fear of being judged. How can you look other parents in the eye when you know your kid was watching Bratz because you forgot to take her to Funky Flamenco? And, above all, we’re scared of screwing it up. Fear is a useful emotion, of course, that keeps us striving for the best for our kids, but it does rather put us on the back foot when it comes to decisive, confident parenting.

Benign neglect is merely about weaving a few adult-centred rituals into your family life. Saturdays at 10.30am could be “coffee time”, when you drink coffee and the kids understand that they need to go and play. Then you could add “lunch time”, when you eat lunch and they understand that they need to go and play. And then there’s “afternoon tea time” . . . all right, you get the idea. We’re not talking seen-and-not- heard neglect. But a bit of talk-to-the-hand-’cos-mum-is-drinking-coffee might be useful. Encourage your children to embrace the mundane. For every three weekend jollies you lay before them, there should be a sprinkling of boring but essential activities, too. Take them to the tip, to the supermarket. Make them queue in the post office with you — otherwise your offspring will grow up thinking life is one long visit to overpriced theme parks. So, forget that Frisbee, put your parental needs back on the agenda and tell Monkey World what it can do with its bananas.

Can We Give Them Back Now? The Aaargh to Zzzz of Parenting by Joanna Simmons and Jay Curtis is published by Square Peg (£9.99)

Benign or neglect

- Refusing to put a plaster on child’s invisible graze caused by passing feather — good.

- Telling child to “brace up” when he has skinned his knees and hit his head falling off the climbing frame —not good.

- Doing oven chips because you can’t be bothered to cook — good.

- Buying them kebab and chips because you can’t be faffed to cook — not good.

- Encouraging them to swap Ben 10 for Masterchef at 6.30pm — good.

- Letting them watch CSI with you at 10.30pm — not good.

- Reading a book on the beach while they build sandcastles — good.

- Falling asleep on the beach while they head off into the surf — very bad.

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