I was at Great Ormond Street hospital last Thursday, and in the waiting room there were all these posters saying: “Speak to your baby or toddler; talking to them is a good idea; it’s friendly and nice and they like it.” Admittedly this was in the speech therapy department/cleft clinic, so I suppose there’s a slim chance that some people think that if their child doesn’t say much it’s okay not to say much back.

Anyway, I was sitting there thinking that it’s a depressing world when people need to be told that it’s a good idea to speak to their small children, especially if those children can’t speak very well themselves. And then, when I got home and finally read the papers, I came across an article about one Judith Rich Harris, an American psychologist who believes that parenting doesn’t have much to do with how a child develops; according to her, the family counts for very little and peer groups count a great deal.

Ergo, you could sit there staring blankly at your child and not saying anything for decades on end and it presumably wouldn’t matter terribly provided a pack of children came round to tea and helped it to integrate. I’m slightly simplifying her hypothesis, but not much.

It sounds completely insane to me, I must say, though I can see how it might seem tempting if you are possessed of especially recalcitrant teenagers. Except that even – especially – recalcitrant teenagers need a bit of robust parental debate every now and then; otherwise frankly it’d all be weed, girls and My Chemical Romance.

Harris’s theory is somewhat undermined by a big long-term government-backed study whose findings were made public last week. Researchers from the London-based Institute of Education studied the way parents interacted with their children and how this affected the way the children grew up. In their report, academics said a home stuffed with toys, books and so on stimulated children up to a point when they were very young, but the effects did not last. Preschool computers and electronic activity boards, which teach toddlers numbers, shapes, colours and language, are among the fastest selling gadgets for young children, but researchers found they were largely unnecessary and said that what children craved above all was personal attention. (I find these toys weird. Why get a computer to teach your child her alphabet, so that she learns it from a disembodied voice with a US twang?)

Dr Leslie Gutman, the report’s lead author, said: “Toys and books have their place and do help children develop, but what is important is having the parents interact with the child. To have parents read to their children is much more important than having 100 books – that’s great, but if you are not reading to your child, that is not engaging with the child.”

I was reading all of this and thinking, “Well yes, obviously”, but then it occurred to me that it’s not that obvious at all. The middle-class version of parenting was praised in the report, which found that better educated, richer mothers interact better with their children, and called on the government to help less educated, poorer mothers to raise their children “properly”. But I don’t think that this is always true. For a start, middle-class parenting relies heavily on farming the children out, to au pairs or nannies or nurseries, which scores a big fat zero on the parental interaction front.

It also relies, stemming from what is usually a combination of guilt and affluence, on bombarding the child with “educational” toys from those transparently aspirational (and gag-making) Baby Einstein DVDs when they are very small to the aforementioned laptops for toddlers when they are a bit older.

How I wish a toy manufacturer would just produce toys for distinctly average children, which is what most children are, regardless of their parents’ boring, ungrateful ambitions. And how I wish that when you looked around schools, someone would come and club those women who loudly ask what provision there is for “gifted” children, when theirs are not even two yet and from what you can observe are about as “gifted” as my big toe. Still, if you want to get away from them, I can recommend asking loudly about special needs provision; you’ll find they recoil in horror and go and stand as far away from you as they can.

Middle-class mothers tend not to view ordinary life – the shops, the park, the launderette, the cafe – as being sufficiently educational and are likely to raise their children in self-created little ghettos of rarefied so-called excellence, where no day is complete without exposure to Sanskrit, baby yoga or violin (I’m not exaggerating: I know several toddlers who do all three, and then some). They mean well, certainly, but again none of this is particularly impressive on the interaction front, and nor is it likely to help children to develop adequate social skills.

I’d go further and argue that a substantial proportion of middle-class mothers are to all intents and purposes completely detached from their children. There are always a couple of them in the playground near where I live, having given the nanny an hour off, flicking their highlights and chatting on their mobiles from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, while their child hovers shyly around the edges of the sandpit, or runs around biting other children, or falls off the edge of the tall slide and gets a nosebleed that it takes their mother minutes to notice.

So we should all have a little think before patting ourselves on the back and feeling delighted at being middle-class parents. We may not stuff Turkey Twizzlers down their throats, and I expect it’s true that we read more to our children, which is a good thing, but I have the feeling that it’s also true that we don’t actually hang out with them in the way that non-middle-class parents do, or encourage them to exist in the real world.

We compensate by buying them expensive toys that are pretty much merit-free, or by taking them on expensive holidays when a bit of English beach and a couple of donkeys would probably be much more to their taste. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this – but there’s nothing terribly right about it either. There are all sorts of ways of not talking to your children and of not interacting with them. Talking over them with a fag and a rum and Coke is one way. But sitting them on the sofa with an organic snack and a toddler laptop while you listen to the Today programme is another.

Times Recommends

• The ghost of Robin Cook haunts Chilcot’s feast
• The truth shouldn’t need oaths
• Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys