Observations on parenting

Who Rules the Roost? and House of Tiny Tearaways are examples of how the BBC is polarising viewers into chavs and the chav-nots. In Beebland, being a bad parent is something "they" do for "our" nightly entertainment.

By "them" I mean mums and dads from housing estates (it doesn't matter if they are private estates, so long as the parents have never read a book or cooked a vegetable). By "us", I mean ABC1 parents watching BBC3 every night of the week.

The best and worst of the shows has to be Honey, We're Killing the Kids. This "unique opportunity for parents to fast-forward into their children's future and actually come face to face with them in middle age [where] often the children are found to be unhealthy, unhappy underachievers and it's all their parents' fault" is to docu-series what Sunny Delight is to a balanced diet.

Each episode begins with a couple locked in an Orwellian cell. Here, the child psychologist "Kris" (a woman so at pains not to be patronising that she verbally kneels to her prey) points to a giant screen, on which a photo of Shaz and Dave's cute but porky offspring is gradually morphed into a creepy, zitty, depressed-looking OAP.

"This is what your child will look like at FORTY unless you take action now," coos Kris, while Mum breaks into guilty sobs.

The adult version of the child that we're shown is, we are told, based on "tests" done by specialists in nutrition and neuroscience. Mum and Dad are told that their "hands-off", "spoiling" love is killing their kids. Do they want Serena to suffer type two diabetes or heart problems? Do they want Ryan to need treatment for depression and obesity?

For the next hour the families try to adhere to "golden rules" - rules middle-class mummies already know by heart, of course: such as children need exercise not TV, green veg not white sugar, nicotine patches not Benson & Hedges.

I know I should dislike Kris Murrin for being so condescending, but the real problem I have with this show is that I want to be her. She says what we long to say to mums shovelling burgers into toddlers in the high street: "Do you want them to die? That is disgusting!"

While BBC3 might be sorting out these children's sugar addiction, it has turned me into a junkie who gets high on social schadenfreude.

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