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.