Have you noticed how everyone these days uses the word “parenting”? It’s not a word our mothers and fathers recognise. They never “parented”. They were just our parents. Not for them the rash of how-to television programmes with dogmatic childcare gurus reducing parents to tears in a tasteless, voyeuristic orgy of censure camouflaged as advice.

Yet in recent months the subject of parenting has moved from being a popular staple of radio stations and newspapers to become a serious point of discussion. This is thanks, largely, to a letter of academic hand-wringing in The Daily Telegraph, signed by the great and the good, that basically broadsided parents. Now there is to be an independent study into childhood lead by Lord Layard, emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Reassuring though the government’s awareness-raising is, is it possible that this forensic examination of the British family will have an adverse effect?

For the swots, sitting anxiously at the front of the class keen to get straight As, being told our parenting skills are less than perfect ramps up a pressure that is already devouring us. We are neurotic about every aspect of the business of parenting. No need to pile on the guilt. We’re doing a fine job of that ourselves.

Those who should be listening to the discussion about problems facing children have never listened and probably won’t now. Witness the defiant Sinner Ladies feeding chips through school playground railings. Their reaction to censure and advice is to behave like the naughty child and do exactly the opposite of what they have been told.

We’ve been observing the phenomenon of extreme parenting since we became mothers ourselves. We’re well practised in puréeing organic food, interpreting school league tables and cramming in a relentless timetable of Tumble Tots and Baby French classes in between work assignments. Now we’re twitchily policing our tweenagers’ internet use and making sure we live within the catchment area of the best secondary school.

We began researching a book – The Madness of Modern Families – assuming that other parents would enjoy telling us about the silly things they’d done in order to keep up with the parenting Joneses. But we were wrong.

A round-robin e-mail to friends asking for confessions gleaned nothing personal – though many were quick to relate others’ extremes. It was clearly too close to the bone. It took greater persuasion to get people to crack and confess to the lengths they’d gone to in the parenting Olympics: to admit to pretending they breastfed or cooked only organic, to concealing intelligence about places at sought-after schools, to forging homework (even deliberately making mistakes to retain authenticity), or playing foreign radio stations as the baby slept to encourage bilingualism. It seems we are so anxious to get it right, to have the most high-achieving children and to be seen to be doing it all effortlessly, that we have lost our perspective. We’ve resorted to subterfuge and corruption, and have come to view other parents as competitors rather than allies.

How did we get here? Why has what was once the most natural thing in the world – nurturing children – become as intense as advanced calculus, and as complicated? We think there are three reasons. Reason one is that our generation believe they have almost total control of their lives. We choose when we get the car, get the mortgage, get the baby and, like a business project, we expect our children to follow our projections. A study by the government think-tank The Future Foundation confirms middle-class parents are bringing business-like attitudes to parenting.

Reason two is that we live in a self-improvement culture. Being “good enough” isn’t good enough any more, and we run ourselves ragged in pursuit of the unobtainable: 24/7 happiness, success and air-brushed perfection.

Reason three is that we are the most inexperienced generation of parents ever, with little contact with children before we hold our own for the first time. So when they do come along, we are paralysed into indecision by a tidal wave of “expert”, often contradictory, advice.

“What drives this cult of intensive parenting is our fear of failing,” says one commentator on a parenting website, “combined with the complicated, uncertain and ever-changing cultural zeitgeist about what constitutes being an excellent parent.”

It’s time to stop this awful self-flagellation. If we don’t, it won’t be just our children who burn out. The danger is that their children, too, will be controlled into passivity, so much so that they won’t know they need to strive for success and happiness, and they won’t enjoy the pleasure of real achievement.

So here’s something else to worry about – we worry too much. Maybe we should learn to shut our ears to what other people think and listen more closely to our instincts. An A+ in Parenting is not only impossible, it’s undesirable. Let’s settle for Good Enough.

‘The Madness of Modern Families’ by Annie Ashworth and Meg Sanders (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99)