The other day, while looking at baby clothes in Gap for a present, I saw a mother slap her little boy, very hard, on his thigh. He was about four and had been pulling at her skirt and whingeing; normal behaviour, in my book, for a small child in a clothes shop. He was distraught when she slapped him and wept, going redder and redder, while she told him, at some length, how naughty he was.

I was so shocked that I felt my legs go slightly weak. I considered saying something (what would Dr Tanya Byron do in a similar situation, I wonder?) but contented myself in the end with a hard stare. They stayed in the shop another five minutes or so by which time the boy had stopped crying. His grandmother was also there and had not intervened; on the other hand, she fussed over him kindly afterwards and as they left I found myself thinking that after all he probably was much loved – it’s just that I, personally, would never do that to a child.

It’s in that last little bit that danger lies. I felt morally superior to that woman: she hits her child and is therefore bad; I don’t hit my child and am therefore good.

And this set me thinking. Am I a better mother than she is? Well, I can’t possibly know. More to the point, why should it matter to me? Shouldn’t it be enough for me to know that I am doing my very best and am continually striving to do better?

How ugly this moral superiority is, and how many of us, especially parents, seek it. For some it becomes almost a way of life, the only way they can gain validation, somehow. Its apotheosis is the pushy mother, the woman who stops at nothing in her bid to make her child the best – for if her child is the best child, it follows that she must be the best mother.

We have witnessed it almost from the start with the story of Madeleine McCann. It was there in the beginning, as in: they left their children alone in the apartment while they went out to eat, I would never have done that; and we’re seeing it big time now as the tide turns against them.

All sorts of incidents are being cited to damn Kate McCann: she shouted at them, she was violent, she must have sedated them because how else could they have slept through and she used to be an anaesthetist so she’d know all about sedation, wouldn’t she . . .

But how quickly we forget. Just as I struggled in Gap to remember exactly what sorts of clothes are best for a six month old baby, so we forget, it seems, what it is like to have toddlers. They scream and have tantrums, a lot. I can remember thinking, when my son was about two, that the neighbours must be thinking I was murdering him, when in fact I was simply insisting that he get dressed. Small children also sleep through almost anything – again, I can remember it taking 10 minutes to wake my daughter and her cousin, then aged 5, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve at the millennium (we wanted them to witness it; they remember it and still talk about it now). The house was literally reverberating with party music and was full of people shouting at the tops of their voices, but they had slept blissfully through.

None of this means the McCanns are innocent, just as it does not mean they are guilty. What’s unpleasant is the moral superiority people now appear to be revelling in: the neighbours say they shouted at their child and now she is dead (and they are probably murderers); the neighbours never complained about me shouting and my child is still alive (and I am not a murderer).

It is as if by thinking like this we feel we somehow gain an extra bit of control over our lives; if only we can find enough evidence to prove in our minds that we are better than other people, then we will be protected from anything bad happening to us and those we love.

But how wrong we are. As I write, 15-year-old Rosemary Edwards is still missing, after more than a week. Her parents had told her off and threatened to stop her horse riding because she had lied to them about how she lost a part-time job. Her father said good night to her at 10.30pm; the following morning, at 7.40am, they discovered she was missing, leaving behind her money, mobile phone, clothes and MP3 player.

Were they wrong to tell her off for lying? Of course not. Can we feel morally superior to them in any way? No, we cannot. Most of us spend our lives trying to do our best: to live sensibly, to protect ourselves and our children from harm. But sometimes bad things happen and there is nothing we can do about it; or we make a mistake and a terrible consequence ensues. Or we find that our intention was good but the outcome was bad. Only this week, new research has shown that because many parents do not let their children cross the road on their own, child fatalities on the roads have increased. It seems that the consequence of children between the ages of 7-10 not being allowed to cross the road alone is that they are less street aware and drivers are less child aware.

At the same time, a group of almost 300 teachers, psychologists, authors and child-care experts have said that overprotective parents are damaging their children’s health and well-being by not letting them play outside alone. It’s the opposite outcome of what was intended, but you can bet that the parents of a child who breaks a leg (let alone is abducted) while playing unsupervised will still suffer the onslaught of the nation’s indignation.

Life is a delicate balance of striving to safeguard against chaos and chance while at the same time allowing freedom and independence. Few of us get it right – but indulging our moral superiority won’t help any of us do it better.

They still didn’t do it

A few weeks ago I wrote that I was sure that Kate and Gerry McCann were innocent. Nothing I’ve read so far changes my opinion. As this dreadful case becomes ever more baffling, so I find myself, trite as it may seem, reflecting on the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. As aficionados of her detective novels will know, she based the solution of every murder on psychology and the forces that drive someone to kill. Presented with evidence but no convincing psychological explanation, neither the brilliant Belgian detective Hercule Poirot nor the redoubtable elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple would be satisfied.

It stretches credulity to its limits to believe that Kate McCann could have killed her daughter and then conspired with her husband to cover it up. They would both have to be psychopaths to enact such a gross conspiracy. It doesn’t add up – but then nothing in this story, based on the few sparse “facts” we know from “sources”, does.

Turning tide of envy

Regular readers will know that The Times has been serialising Paul McKenna’s book, How To Be Rich. In a riveting interview in times2 last week, he told Catherine O’Brien how Britain is “riddled with vindictive envy towards the rich”. We still speak, he pointed out, of the “filthy rich”: imagine the reaction if we were to apply the same adjective to any other sector of society – black people, say, or Jews.

And it is envy that is partly responsible for the tide of public opinion turning against the McCanns. They are attractive, professional, and live in a big house. Reportedly, more than 17,000 signatures have been added to an internet petition urging police and social services to investigate them for “neglecting” their children (see left re: moral superiority) with many adding abusive remarks and claiming that they have been given an easy ride because they are – evil of evils – middle class.

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