As regular readers of this column will be aware, I appear to have missed my vocation. Like thousands of would-be students, I’ve just sat the Stamford Test on the UCAS website to determine my professional bent and guess what? I should have been a beauty therapist.

To be fair to the Stamford Test, it hadn’t seen my picture by-line when it came up with this option. It has also suggested a course in restoration, which is a far more appropriate choice.

Or, I might find my métier in peace studies. As a mother of three this is a subject in which I am already overqualified.

But were I 18 years old again and embarking on what the chief executive of UCAS calls “one of the most important decisions of your life”, I would do what everybody else is doing and yell: “Help, Mum.”

News that parents have won the right to act for their offspring in the university admissions process has been met with the sort of derision usually reserved for Labour canvassers in a by-election. Frank Furedi, professor of sociology from Kent University, warned that school leavers were being “infantilised”. He spoke of parents expecting to sit in on their children’s university interviews. The pushy parent is the 21st century equivalent of the parvenu, a social pariah universally despised. The archetype drives a 4x4 and drags in her wake Boden-clad offspring, clutching cellos and plugged into iPods loaded with language tapes. These are the middle-class carpet baggers, the parental equivalents of Germans with beach towels, hogging the loungers of academia.

They are fair game for everybody from politicians to royalty. The Duke of Edinburgh was at pains not so long ago to deny that his awards scheme was aimed at them. And while Cherie Blair was hoovering up Bristol properties with Rackmanite relish to ensure her son’s every comfort at university, her husband was assuring the nation that whoever his education reforms were aimed at, they certainly weren’t intended to help bright kids bound for university.

But what, exactly, is wrong with parents helping their children negotiate the minefield that is the UCAS clearing system? When did it become an offence to take an interest in your children’s tertiary education?

Professor Cary Cooper, of Lancaster University Management School, was quoted as saying: “These parents are paying more, so they think they can demand more.” What arrogance. What other service industry would expect its customers to write a blank cheque for thousands of pounds without being informed about what they were buying?

The average 18-year-old will base his choice of tertiary education as much on the nightlife and the price of a pint as the course work. It’s understandable if parents give the system the third degree in an effort to prevent it giving their child a third-class degree several years down the line. This is particularly relevant when so many universities are determined to discriminate against pupils who are bright, articulate and come from a particular postcode or a certain school.

We’re not talking about obsessive parents who aren’t content unless their three-year-old is playing Mozart and conversing in Mandarin. We’re talking about concerned parents clarifying the options available at a crucial point in their child’s life.

Far from being pariahs, so-called pushy parents are the drivers of excellence. For talent to fulfil its potential, it needs nurture, discipline, encouragement and space to grow, virtues that are in short supply. That means parents prepared to get up at the crack of dawn to drive to sporting fixtures, only to freeze and cheer on the sidelines. It means parents prepared to make themselves unpopular by holding firm and instilling discipline and routine into their offspring’s lives. These are qualities against which there has been a prolonged and sustained campaign and we are paying the price with a generation of kids who have the concentration level and stamina of a goldfish.

Behind every successful child is a “pushy” parent. You don’t win an Olympic medal without a bit of parental sacrifice and a lot of parental encouragement. For every Andy Murray, there is a Judy cajoling from the sidelines. For every Rebecca Adlington, there is a Kay offering a pair of Louboutin heels as an incentive. For every Nicola Benedetti there is a Giovanni, inspiring and encouraging. They are the unsung heroes. Far from despising them, we should acknowledge their commitment and resolve.

I find this demonising of parents whose only crime is to have their children’s best interests at heart, deeply disturbing. In an age when we pussyfoot around parents who are feckless to the point of being criminal, when we make endless excuses for the drug-addled or alcohol-fuelled, the opprobrium that we heap on involved parents is sinister in the extreme.

We need more parents who are involved and interested in their children’s lives, not fewer. Perhaps some enterprising university could run a degree course in pushy parenting.

gillian.bowditch@sunday-times.co.uk