A shameful truth – we can't help embarrassing our children

Take, for instance, the time my friend's father put his coat on as he was leaving a restaurant and dragged it across the dessert trolley, scraping the cream off the top of the trifle and toppling millefeuille as he went.

As a one-off this was pretty spectacular, as was this, from a Scottish friend: "My mother – and I will never forget this, my cheeks still burn with the shame of it – told the man at the ticket desk of the Glasgow Palladium that I was four, so she could get me in free to the pantomime. It was my FIFTH birthday treat for goodness sake! I was so ashamed I told the man – and the queue – in no uncertain terms that I

was not a four-year-old baby but in fact five years old, thank you very much."

How does it happen? One moment you are a perfectly reasonable, normal person, not given to outrageous displays of extreme behaviour, and the next – a few years into parenthood, to be exact – you are a walking, talking embarrassment your children would prefer not to be seen with in public. Or behind closed doors, come to that.

You have, in fact, become all those cringemaking things your own parents seemed to be years ago. You loved them to bits, probably, but still wanted to dematerialise when they had had a couple of drinks and began talking loudly or, even worse, singing.

My father would pretend he was Bing Crosby, crooning True Love to mother with the kitchen window open. Most heinously, he would grab her from behind, twirl her, and waltz her around the room, shouting over his shoulder: "This is real dancing, not that stuff on Top of the Pops." Oh, the shame.

But today my own daughters will shriek at me to wind up the car windows quickly, in case anyone they know can hear me singing along to the

radio. They don't like me to speak too loudly, shout across the street or a room to get their attention ("yoo-hoo" being the worst utterance in the English language, apparently), and they can't bear parental nakedness, parental expressions of affection, parents expressing any opinion on popular culture or anything else in front of their friends, or any sign of us trying to "get down with the kids" by listening to "their" music or shopping at "their" shops. Top Shop and H&M are verboten.

The absolute worst and most embarrassing parental crime is anything your children perceive as "making a fuss", whether questioning a bill, returning goods to a shop or talking to teachers.

This tale is still fresh and galling as ever in another friend's mind: "I joined upper sixth of a boys' school as one of the first nine girls. I got a part in the school play, which was Oh! What a Lovely War. The play has loads of rude words in it, so we were each given a copy and had to go through it deleting swear words and replacing them with 'nicer' ones.

"My mother – a forceful personality – spotted the deleted swear words, let rip and tried to get the play cancelled. Her point was fair – if the words were too strong for parents to hear, presumably they were too strong for children to read and should have been blocked first. But it was so mortifying. I wasn't quite sent to Coventry but there was a massive fuss before the play went ahead."

Mothers in particular seem to come in for a pasting from their children for behaviour as innocent and loving as kissing a child at the school gates or wiping dirt from their face with a licked finger.

We might know we're being embarrassing, but we do it anyway, according to research done by Gordon Ramsay's Seriously Good sauces, a range developed to raise money for Comic Relief.

About 72 per cent of mothers know they embarrass their children, whether by showing baby photos to their friends, singing or dancing or holding their husband/partner's hand.

Instead of worrying about it, perhaps we should celebrate this embarrassment, regarding it as a rite of passage all children must live through and learn from in order to become fully paid-up embarrassing parents themselves.

It is therefore your bounden duty to practise the following:

n 1. Shout "Hello Pumpkin!" across the school hall on parents' evening

n 2. Wear your 70s penny round shirts and platforms as often as possible in public

n 3. Buy a sweater very similar to your daughter's, also from Top Shop

n 4. Kiss your teenager in public

n 5. Use some of "their" language and feign love of "their" music

n 6. Join Facebook

n 7. Tell their friends that hilarious story about how they cried with

stagefright during their first school show

n 8. Wear your pyjamas for the school run

That should do the job nicely.