Are our babies and children today over-trained by over-anxious parents? They must follow a pattern, stick to the rules, wake up and go to sleep at appropriate times and eat only at prescribed mealtimes.

If you look up books on parenting, you will find tonnes of 'How to be a good parent' books. There are also so many programmes which teach you how to make your child more creative, intelligent, better at maths, and much more.

Children today are burdened with so many inflexible routines and the ominous regime of 'early learning'.

Over the past three decades, changes in the way we treat our children have been huge.

We are having fewer children. There is a growing middle class with more disposable income to spend on less children. As a result, we may be heading towards creating a new breed of parents who are over-anxious for their children and practise over-parenting.

Trust

We are no longer able to trust our own children anymore. Over-parenting has produced a situation where children are seen as extensions of the parent's own dreams and ambitions, but as a consequence, are unable to become fully independent adults in their own right.

It is a mind set which demands that we become not simply a child's parent, but also a teacher, an advocate in the barren world of proper education, a therapist, best friend, dietician, and more.

All this work must be squashed into that misleading phenomenon - quality time. Parents are inevitably spoken of as time-starved because of their long working hours; they must therefore compensate with this sort of intense and intrusive, but obviously, educational focus.

Is this what parenting is all about? Being with a child is often full of banal, repetitive activities. It is monotonous, because small children often like to do the same things over and over again. They do not want to do a jigsaw and move on, they want to do the same puzzle 20 times.

Sometimes they like to do very little other than sit and stare. Boredom can breed creativity. Look at how kids can play imaginatively with just a few cardboard boxes or how a pillow can become a teddy bear, a baby, or how your cassettes become cars, houses and how the tape inside becomes long, long snakes.

The current ethos of compulsory learning and creativity leads to overloaded boredom, with kids being hauled around museums and forced to produce works of art on demand.

Allowing a child to be bored requires a degree of trust that is no longer the norm. We fear that their boredom will lead them to unhealthy activities.

Most of our kids had passed through the education system without ever thinking of themselves as anything but victims. They were not grateful for the chance they had been given. Kids who have been written off have been brought up to think it's not their fault. In some ways it isn't.

The view that parental influence is the only factor molding a child, is so oversubscribed that it assumes that children exist in vacuum. If children do well, it is to the credit of their family; if they do badly, something has gone wrong at home. Thus we remove any sense of individual responsibility or even personality difference.

Anyone with more than one child will tell you, shockingly, that even children brought up in the same family are entirely different. Some are academic, some are not; some like sports, some don't.

Paradoxically, however, the belief that nurture is everything, though challenged in many areas of science, has filtered down to the child-rearing masses. Children are often our only creative projects, reflections of our ability to be good at something.

Thus an entire industry is devoted to both arousing and then catering for anxiety in parents. The foetus must be stimulated in the womb with a mixture of whale noises and Mozart.

From theories that children should sleep in light-proof, pitch dark rooms, it is but a short stroll to all those guides that tell you how to get your child into the best universities.

One minute it's all Montessori, the next it's Kumon.

It appears that only weird parents bother to ask about the actual happiness of our children. For the goal of all our 'paranoid parenting' is not happiness. It is educational success.

Rigorous education system

Yet most of our graduates do not get jobs linked to their degree - which in turn shows that any idea of education for its own sake, for the good of all, is simply wasteful.

While the parenting and education industry set out to guide parents through the dangerous and difficult process of sending their child to school, actual analysis of the benefits of the increasingly exam-heavy and competitive system is not provided.

In fact, the exam-oriented education system is a torture for our kids and is even seen as a breach of the UN convention on children's rights.

In 2003, the UN Special rapporteur on the Right to Education, Prof Katarina Tomasevski, claimed that the testing regime in English schools breaches the UN Convention on Children's Rights.

Current estimates in the United Kingdom say a child will take 105 tests or exams during his or her school career. In some schools in Malaysia, the numbers can be higher.

Speaking generally about the education system, she said that testing was producing uniformity and that the ideology of target-setting and delivery had come from command-and-control economies such as China and the former Soviet Union.

To move away from the current system would require an ability that we have lost. We would have to be able to trust our children. However the children who are clearly not going to be OK are the children of the poor.

It cannot be said enough, but many of our children are healthy and safe and get some sort of education, whatever we might do to them. They will eventually make their own way in the world.

The outside world will come into their lives, whatever we do, and surely when it does, we want them to embrace it, not be frightened of it. But if they are not happy and successful, whose fault is it? Not theirs.

Yet how can it be ours when, after all, we did everything for them: we gave up our lives for them, we had them tutored into the ground, we thought long and hard about schools, gave them the right books and educational toys, paid their tuition fees, asked them to embody all our hopes and fears, to prove that we had done the best, that we were the best?

Did we have time to ask them if they were happy? Of course not. We were far too busy worrying about their future.

The writer is the president of the environmental group, Sahabat Alam Malaysia.