Okay Harry, you win the cup for childbirth championship

After competitive childbirth comes competitive parenting in the smug middle-class boasting event, says Aidan Smith

What separates football superstars from the likes of me, sclaffing and blootering around my local public park, is the fierce competitive instinct. Well, that and the epic skills deficit but we’ll gloss over this to stand in awe of the winning-iseverything attitude of the guys who play for a living.

Take Harry Kane, the England captain. Earlier this year the striker was desperately trying to win the Golden Boot for the most goals scored in the Premier League. So desperate, in fact, that he claimed a strike which patently wasn’t his. He said he got the final, whispery touch on the ball but he hadn’t. Result: ridicule on social media. I laughed, but deep down still admired Kane. Here was that brazenness in trampling all over his rivals which I simply didn’t possess.

Well, he’s been at it again, only this time as a father, after announcing the arrival of his second child on Twitter. “So proud,” he blurted, because his fiancee Kate Goodland had given birth to their daughter Vivienne “with no pain relief at all”. Result: more ridicule. Why was he trying to turn producing babies into a sport? After failing to win the World Cup, was he now bringing his famous competitiveness to the World Childbirth Championships?

To defend him again, I’m sure he wasn’t claiming that the birth of his daughter was a more spectacular event than the birth of your child if an epidural was involved, or the arrival of my son into the world a few days before last Christmas, when one indeed was. Kane tried to quell the Twitternado with a subsequent despatch, but even this didn’t come out quite right. Women could give birth “however they would like”, he said, a mite condescendingly. Then he cranked up his pride to “very proud”. There are, it seems to this dad of four, two issues here: competitive childbirth, which definitely does exist, and the part in it played by men.

To use a football analogy, competitive childbirth is a qualifying tournament for competitive parenting, the big daddy (or mummy) event of smug middle-class boasting. A woman can feel she’s been knocked out in the first round if she opted to be knocked out by pain relief during birth and so many others seem to have done it “naturally”. In babygroup chatter in the coffee shop or online, mums may not mean to brag, although some might, and the same when they’re talking about the texture of their home-made rusks or the torque on their designer buggies. The buggies themselves are a baby-industry con targeting mens’ weakness for sleek, wheeled transporters. When they feel the buggies possess the requisite snob value and don’t compromise their manliness, they’ll sanction the exorbitant costs.

For No 4, my wife and I picked up the apparent Lamborghini of buggies on Gumtree, dirt cheap. We couldn’t believe the price, or the pristine condition. This pram had obviously never traversed broken pavements. You might assume that after three kids we knew what we were doing on this latest – and definitely last – trip to the maternity wards, but the only constant connecting all four births has been when, in an effort to lift some of the tension, I’ve popped a “sick cup” on my head and rasped: “Siddin’ at my piano!” Each time my wife has groaned, and not through birth pains.

This was me impersonating Eric Morecambe, impersonating Jimmy Durante, which will tell you that I’m at the mature end of the dad scale. So mature, indeed, that I remem-