With all the modern obstacles that stand in the way of a relaxed parenthood, you’d think fellow mums and dads would stop banging the rest of us over the head with their parenting superiority. Whether it’s preschooler vegetarianism, Mozart-driven genius development or kiddie yoga, the preening parent is less interested in doing their best than they are in making you look your worst.

They don’t think It Takes a Village – they’ve got you as the Village Idiot; marking you down for misdemeanors that range from raising your voice at a naughty toddler to playing AC/DC in the car.

For generations fathers attempted to be less incompetent than the worst guy in the street. We used to be able to say, ‘I do my best’; that was considered fairly good going. But your best is not good enough in the modern world. With preening parents, life is a hierarchy and they want to be on the rung above you.

Gee, you only breast-fed for six months? You don’t feed your child soy milk, do you? Please, don’t tell me you smack? Seriously, you really don’t do maths coaching? Haven’t you read the latest research on antibiotics? Do you know what’s really in milk? That’s not a second-hand child restraint, is it? Hey Mark – I guess you didn’t read that thing about sugar being child-abuse, huh? Judgments posing as questions.

There’s been a lag of 20 years between my first go at parenting and this latest rotation. Back then, there were certainly preeners who arrived at the play park with their jute bags of wholefood snacks in their BPA-free containers, drink bottles in insulated sleeves, legionnaires caps, zinc cream, sunblock, sun umbrellas and everything that went ‘beep’ monitoring something the rest of us didn’t know existed. ‘Hemingway!’ they would cry, ‘Mummy’s going to cut-up your organic pomegranate, so hurry up with downward dog and do hand-wiping so Mummy can feed you.’

We knew these people because they’d escort their playing child every step of the way, ensuring that no slide down a slide nor swing on a swing could be so blissful for the child that it couldn’t be helped by a dose of close-range anxiety parenting.

Somewhere along the line, as surely as playground sawdust turned into soft-fall rubber mulch, the handwringing of the smother-mother became less of a social oddity and more a superiority complex into which we have all been sucked. It’s an anxiety contest – you only care about parenting if you’re scared witless about it.

Governments have pandered to this manic worrying, splurging money on not only hand-outs to help people have children (it’s no longer possible without a government grant), but generating endless rules and ‘new research’ about parenting, much of which ends up as news headlines and grist for the infernal Mummy Media. My latest favourite comes from the Victorian Department of Health: ‘Let your child decide whether they will eat and how much they will eat.’ Which is diametrically opposed to the health department rules on child diets and the bottomless pools of guilt for creating a generation of fatties.

Other government ‘help’ for parents is long on information and short on judgment. Look at the Australian Institute for Family Studies’ must-do list in raising healthy and happy children: 40 commandments, featuring shibboleths such as ‘peaceful conflict resolution’, ‘cultural competence’ and ‘honesty’. Forty?! God could only manage ten when he briefed Moses.

Perhaps the most annoying feature of the modern parent is the insistence on referring to themselves in the third person. Why they feel the need to broadcast to other parents their every thought and move, as if they’re narrating a scene from a parenting guide, is an eternal mystery. And if only the announcements were a little more profound: ‘Daddy’s going to wipe your nose,’ or ‘Mummy’s getting a little sick of your whining’, is hardly worthy of a broadcast, regardless of how perfect it makes the parent appear; ‘Mummy’s going to change your nappy because Daddy couldn’t be bothered,’ is not really a communication with the child at all.

In the end, most modern parents would benefit from competing less with other parents and feeling less guilty about the advice churned out by bureaucrats.

Parents, after all, are not supposed to be perfect.

That’s something we foist on our kids.