Years ago I used to know a couple whose party trick was to get their infant child to come downstairs when they had guests for supper. Everyone had to shush as the child was asked how planes stayed up in the sky. “Aerodynamics,” he would lisp, aged two. The parents would stand there beaming with pride as the assorted guests tried not to throw up – or maybe it was just me, and the others were in fact green with envy.

Obviously the little boy wasn’t precociously au fait with the intricacies of velocity and subsonic flow – he had just been taught to parrot a word that made his parents feel good. Everyone would murmur things such as “so clever” and “you’ve got a genius on your hands” and then the child would bumble back off to his cot.

No one is keen on encouraging a child to be dim. But the thing about pushy parents is that their pushiness is often entirely and poignantly about their own insecurities and has very little to do with the child’s desires or wellbeing.

The couple with the two-year-old wanted to be thought of as having produced a demonstrably clever child through the sheer excellence of their genes. Together, they would make sure that their child was somebody. (It’s odd, really. There are many reasons people succeed or fail in life, but failure in adulthood is not usually thought to be directly linked to a paucity of fencing classes or violin lessons in childhood.)

It seemed churlish at the time to point out that, actually, all this couple had produced was a blessedly normal child who, through their attempts to freakify him, was likely to have quite a hard time in the playground five years down the line. Except, as it turned out, the boy did not spend that much time hanging out with other children because his diary was so crammed with extracurricular activities: he was the first real, as opposed to apocryphal, toddler I knew who was made to learn Sanskrit (this was more than 15 years ago – today it would be Mandarin). No doubt he’s heading for a Cambridge double first as we speak.

It would also be churlish to suggest that the double first won’t be a considerable achievement or that it will be unrelated to his parents’ tireless efforts at improving his mind from the tenderest age. Credit where credit’s due: pushiness usually pays off on the academic front. Unless you are naturally superbright, cleverness is closely related to swotting. Turn your infant into the most amazing swot and you can’t go far wrong. He may have no friends and may never have climbed a tree but, hey – he’s en route to becoming a master of the universe, so that’s okay. (That’s the theory, anyway. He may be en route to decades of therapy, during which he tells a stranger how much he hates you.)

A study by the University of London reported last week in New Scientist magazine revealed that determined mothers, in particular, tend to produce ultra-confident daughters. This has been widely misinterpreted to mean that becoming the modern-day equivalent of an old-fashioned stage mother is a good thing.

What the study actually shows is the importance of having confidence in your children, which is not remotely the same thing as being pushy: it is arguably the exact opposite. Have confidence in their abilities, the study concludes, and they will have few issues with self-esteem.

This does not mean forcing them to do five A-levels. It means not snorting and saying, “Yeah, right,” when your child announces she would like to be foreign secretary; and it also means, surely, leading by example, which probably means working – because it’s harder to be ambitious and confident when you’re milling about vacuuming or putting a load of washing on.

A closer look at the study reveals that there were 300 boys and girls involved, born in 1970. When the children were aged 10, their mothers were asked at what age they believed their child would leave school – a question chosen to illustrate each mother’s belief in her child’s capabilities. Twenty years later the children themselves answered questions designed to measure their self-confidence.

Those whose mothers had high hopes for them were more likely to report that they felt in control of their lives by the age of 30. The answers also showed that the self-esteem of the women was linked to their mothers’ belief in them as they were growing up, regardless of other factors such as class and education.

In addition, a mother’s own confidence and ambition were deemed likely to have rubbed off on her daughter.

I’m stumbling along in the dark like everybody else when it comes to child-rearing, but this study makes perfect sense to me. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who thought my ambitions were a bit low-key – when I wanted to be a nurse, she said I should be a doctor; when I wanted to learn Italian, she asked what was wrong with Arabic or Chinese; when I said I might be a journalist, she wondered what on earth was wrong with me – what about the Nobel for literature?

She was not remotely pushy – I don’t recall her ever looking over my homework – but she had absolute faith in me.

I don’t ever look at my own children’s homework either (in some circles this is akin to child abuse) because they are perfectly intelligent teenagers who don’t need their mummy to help with commas or write their essays for them on the sly, and I have absolute faith in them.

They spend a lot of time just sort of hanging out. No doubt they could be honing their intellects instead of going to see bands or drawing cartoons. But they are their own creatures, for better or worse – not some tragic experiment in creating the version of myself that I’d have liked to be.

Everyone wants the best for their children, whether they are pushy parents or the more shambolic kind. I may be completely allergic to pushiness, but I don’t deny that it has its advantages.

Where it fails is in creating confident, relaxed, well-rounded people who are socially at ease wherever they may land. Which is to say, happy people. Tell your children to aim high and let them get on with it.

- There was lots in the newspapers last week about our “broken society” – the man in Norwich who was murdered because he tried to stop someone being beaten up; the disturbed young man on the roof of a building who was urged to jump to his death by a jeering mob (who then rushed, mobiles at the ready, to take pictures of his broken corpse).

Back in the world where people aren’t actively murderous, there’s a weird fin-de-siècle feel to London social life – it’s like the last days of the Roman empire. On Thursday night I was having a drink in a fashionable bar with a friend. Everything looked photogenic and cool. Celebs were milling, people were having cocktails and if any of them were worried about their savings they weren’t saying.

There was a huge plasma screen along one wall of the bar, on which a film was soundlessly playing. “Oh my God,” my friend said. “They’re showing A Clockwork Orange.” So they were: in fact, we were about 15 seconds away from the rape scene. We looked around; nobody seemed to be remotely concerned about what was taking place on the screen – the violation of a woman by Alex and his Droogs.

We called a waiter over and said we didn’t really fancy watching a terrorised woman being raped while sipping our drinks and asked for the film to be changed. When did ultraviolence become ultrachic, to be used as background to lychee martinis?

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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