Pushy parents have become the perfect bogeymen The current edition of Attain, the journal of the Independent Association of Prep Schools (IAPS), contains two articles from head teachers despairing at the excesses of competitive parents. Leonard Blom, headmaster of St Aubyn's preparatory school in London, reports that some parents are destroying their children's enjoyment of sport by screaming "hysterically" at them from the sidelines. Mr Blom describes how one father got so carried away while watching a junior rugby game that he ran on to the pitch and took a line-out himself; while a mother collapsed from exhaustion after pacing alongside a swimming pool during a race, shouting at her daughter. Meanwhile Julie Robinson, a former headmistress who now works for the IAPS, warns that "overbearing parents" are making their children stressed and anxious by not giving them any free time in which to be bored. "It is all too easy," she says, "for parents to be sucked into a competitive busyness, ensuring that children are constantly occupied and stimulated." Boo hiss to them! What satisfactory baddies they make, these rich neurotics, ruining their children's lives by driving them too hard. We don't even have to qualify our disapproval with pity, the way we do when disapproving of poor parents. There are now two types of bogeyman in modern parenting, occupying opposite poles. At one end, the negligent or abusive parent: a slack-jawed troglodyte from the primeval swamps of the underclass. At the other, the pushy parent: the gimlet-eyed Lady Macbeth of the nursery. The territory in between - where we are allowed to just get on with being parents, however inexpertly - seems to get narrower all the time. And we parents collude in our own entrapment. The pleasure we lazy ones take in censuring our pushier brethren is, in fact, just another form of competition. It makes us feel better about our own inadequacies. A father who gets over-excited on the touchline may be embarrassing, but at least he is there. Driving your child from Kumon class to karate lesson might not seem like an expression of love, but it is one. Perhaps the real reason I can't see any "pushy parents" among my friends is that they are actual people, not fairy-tale villains.