Pencils at the ready for top tip

who's the daddy logo

Even though it is the only column ostensibly about parenting which actively dislikes children, this week it contains a golden nugget which will make handling your shrieking social hand grenade that little bit easier.

It’s so good there’s no way a man could’ve dreamt it up. This is pure genius which could only have come from the brain of a mother – in our case the boss, who has kept our kids in check with just a sharp click of her fingers since the day they learned to answer back.

Anyway, find yourself a quiet corner and watch and learn. It involves a small financial outlay but it’s like investing in a stocks and shares ISA, in the long term you get loads more out than you ever put in. So here goes…

When your kids are little, take them to a stationery shop. Hand them a small tin and tell them to go around the place filling it up with pens, pencils, highlighters, erasers, rulers, pencil sharpeners, Post-it notes, glue sticks, whatever. Even if the whole lot comes to £10, it’ll be the best tenner you ever spend.

To most young kids, a trip to a stationers is like a trolley dash around Selfridges for a footballer’s wife. There is nothing finer, apart from maybe Christmas morning or their sibling being in real trouble with mum and dad when they’ve done nothing wrong.

So once the tin is full and your wide-eyed nipper is wondering what they’ve done to deserve their trip to Narnia, take them home and let them get to work, drawing, colouring, sticking and cutting.

Then, when trouble starts (daughter #2’s party piece was ramming her trolley full of wooden bricks into the Christmas tree while her big sister waved an imaginary yellow card at us) sit them down, put their stationery tin in front of them and – this is the genius bit – get THEM to remove one item as punishment.

This is deep parenting and is more effective than any telling off you’ve ever heard of. Naughty step? That’s pure Amateur Night, buddy. Getting young kids to deny themselves their own hand-picked stationery is world-class behaviour control.