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How I have enjoyed watching St Jamie of Oliver, crusader for culinary correctness, squirm as his Ministry of Food programme proves unpalatable to the good people of Rotherham. It was Oliver who, in his mission to reform the contents of children’s packed lunches for school, branded parents ‘arseholes’, ‘idiots’ and ‘tossers’, and did more than any civil servant in the Department of Health to popularise the idea that the most important thing in a child’s life is that they know how to cook a sea-bass.

The obsession with making sure that children eat exactly the right food, from top policymakers to celebrity chefs, looks like rampant food snobbery. Let's face it, we all think we know what kind of parents let their kids gorge on crisps and fizzy drinks, and they don’t live in the desirable parts of Islington.

It is tempting to see much parenting policy in terms of the foisting of middle-class values and practices upon the poor. The contempt for teenage mothers, the ceaseless promotion of the breastfeeding imperative, the demand that parents get ever-more intimately involved in their children’s education: what seems to hold all of these initiatives together is the prejudice that the kind of parenting practices often associated with the middle classes represent the only right way to parent. Therefore poor parents – those with little money – must practice ‘poor parenting’.

This prejudice is an insult to low-income families, most of whom are doing their best to raise their children in difficult circumstances and really do not need another lecture on the virtues of organic produce and the cognitive benefits of creative play. But the problem is more than mere snobbery.

Parents today are expected to conform to a degree of lifestyle correctness that is not about promoting ‘middle class values’ over ‘working class values’ so much as expecting all parents to follow a particular set of arbitrary rules laid down by self-appointed parenting experts. After all, certain aspects of what we might consider ‘middle class’ life – drinking wine with your partner at night, putting pressure on your children to succeed academically – are not generally favoured by the good parenting brigade either.

The assumption behind all this is that the petty minutiae of parents’ behaviour determines everything about a child’s wellbeing and future life chances. This view assumes that the damage caused by a parent smoking a cigarette outweighs all the love, care and fun that make up that child’s family life. It supposes that it is legitimate to micro-manage the contents of the family meal through hectoring those ‘tosser’ parents, regardless of the impact this has upon families’ abilities to relax and enjoy everyday life. Poor parents don’t make bad parents: but over-anxious, browbeaten, rule-bound parents do.

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Join the Debate: Read Jennifer Howze on Stop pointing the finger at parents

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Jennie Bristow is a journalist and editor of the website www.ParentsWithAttitude.com. She is co-convening and speaking at the ‘Battle for the Family’ strand at the Battle of Ideas.