My son has a confidence issue – he’s got too much

Riding high in the American bestseller charts, The Confidence Code for Girls considers how we can make girls less anxious and more inclined to take risks.

Involving dads is one tip. My suggestion would be to outlaw social media and go back to the halcyon days when your daughter didn’t measure her worth by the number of likes on Facebook. Sadly, that’s never going to happen, so girls will continue to have mental health problems as they work themselves into the ground to achieve perfect exam scores.

At the moment, here in Revision Hell, we have a slightly different problem featuring the male of the species. “Mum, you’re paranoid, neurotic and tyrannical,” quoth the Boy. What had I done? Nothing. Merely suggested he get some lined cards to put quotes on. Maybe even, you know, draw up a revision timetable?

Preposterous suggestion! Back off! Everything is in hand. Othello? That’s the one with the black guy and the hankie, right?

OK, I exaggerate. At least, I hope I do. Still, it’s excruciating this clash between a perfectionist, hardworking female who fears failure for a son who is sublimely confident there is nothing to fear.

I know I should allow him to fall flat, if that’s what’s going to happen, but every maternal instinct shrieks that I must protect him from himself.

Time for a sex change? Goodbye paranoid, neurotic and tyrannical. Hello, winging it, I’ll be fine, please just chill. Reckon I can manage that for a bit. Oh hell, what if he gets a B?

My experience suggests they are on to something: I spent

Easter with daughters who will do fine in their exams, but think they are going to bomb unless they work all the hours God sends and more. But I wonder whether the opposite problem might also be worth addressing.

My son was sure that he could wing his A-levels and instead crashed and burned. Data from the financial markets suggest that he is not alone in his hubris: men who own shares think they know what’s going on, whereas women know they don’t, so men trade more than women do, and (because each trade costs money) the more you trade, the less money you tend to make.

Still, I doubt that my forthcoming volume, The Modesty Manual for Boys: How to Crush Your Son’s Excessive Self-esteem – with its handy tips on yelling at your offspring that he isn’t half as good as he thinks he is and his life will be a horrible failure if he doesn’t do his homework – is going to follow Kay and Shipman on to the bestseller list.