There is some startlingly explicit advice in the new information packs being distributed to first-time fathers. In the section on work, sleep and the resumption of conjugal relations in the months after a child is born, proud dads are warned: “You need to give her . . . regular morning lie-ins.”

There are other helpful pointers, too, including a bracing injunction to “sort yourself out”, which must be sound advice for flailing parents of all ages and of couch-dwelling dads. But nothing in this new-dads’ bible is more calculated to induce guilt in “old” ones than its breezy, and no doubt justified, assertion of leisurely mornings as a new mother’s right.

“Daddy packs” (free to their target readership but £2.50 to agencies that give them out) are an outspoken outgrowth of outreach efforts to new fathers requested by the Government in February. The language (“knackered”, “dodgy”, “get stuck in”) is at the hip end of what taxpayers will tolerate. Some of the artwork recalls an animated airline safety cartoon, c 1998. Taken together, they are not so much the naggings of a nanny state as the chummy worldliness of a right-on granny state.

Shouldn’t all this come as naturally to us as it presumably did to our cave-dwelling forebears? Perhaps, but it would be a hard-hearted veteran who begrudged a newcomer to the parenting business his free poster bearing, in speech bubbles, 100 ways to praise his child. This poster is Dad’s only “treat”. It hardly matches new mothers’ heavily branded Bounty packs. Sponsors sought, therefore, for several million celebratory Cohibas, muslin bandanas and patriarchal travel pillows.

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