A handwritten thank-you note after every birthday, elbows off the table on repeat, and no phones at dinner. Unfashionable, perhaps. Why manners were never about performing for adults, and how small habits, said a thousand times, finally stick.

Grey trays, forgettable food, and twenty minutes I looked forward to every day. My own children never had that. Why every box now comes home empty, what France and Japan get right, and why a packed lunch shouldn't be necessary at all.

I followed Gina Ford, the English childcare author whose strict feeding-and-sleep schedules became something of a cult method for a generation of new mothers, to the letter.

There is a school of thought, much repeated in the parenting circles I occasionally find myself adjacent to, that says we should never really tell a child no.