Competition drives UK's pushy parents to extremes

LONDON, Nov 6 (Reuters) Britain's middle classes are in the grip of a new madness, says author Meg Sanders -- parenting madness.

Desperate to excel in every field, normally sensible, well-educated parents are resorting to increasingly insane measures to outdo other families and give their offspring the edge.

From mothers who secretly train at home for the grown-ups' egg-and-spoon race on school sports day, to those who follow the school bus on its trip to France in case any harm might come to their offspring, parents are taking it to the extreme.

Sanders and fellow author Annie Ashworth have brought out a book -- ''The Madness of Modern Families'' -- which they hope will encourage the worst offenders to take a step back and laugh at their own sometimes ridiculous behaviour.

The book tells of parents who play foreign radio stations in childrens' bedrooms so they can learn languages in their sleep, mothers who buy supermarket cakes and ''distress'' them to make them look home-baked and fathers who forge their children's homework and include ''authentic'' errors to make it look real.

''I've spent nights sort of rubbing out her times table and rewriting them and trying to recreate her handwriting, and getting the five round the wrong way and stuff,'' one father confesses. ''And you think: What am I doing, what am I doing?'' British parents are not alone. In the United States, some middle class parents have long been prepared to do whatever it takes to give their children an edge that can lead to better marks, better colleges and a better future.

PROBLEM PARENTS The authors paint light-hearted, but worryingly recognisable, sketches of certain modern parent types.

There's Helicopter Mummy, who hovers constantly by her child's side, never allowing it out of her sight, and Touchline Dad, who bellows ''get stuck in'' at his reluctant mini-rugby playing son and whose wife sits by the swimming pool timing the child's backstroke laps on the stopwatch on her mobile phone.

Eco Mummy feeds her children -- all of whom were born on her kitchen floor at home -- on ''biodynamic felafel and organic mushroom pate'', while Craft Mummy will ''carefully hand you a collage of leaves and grasses that is not quite dry'' when you go to pick up your children up from a playdate.

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