When you’re a parent, there are countless thrilling opportunities to doubt yourself. Each decision you make has the potential to be the key to your child’s lifelong happiness, or identified as the moment it all went wrong by their future therapist.

This week, as the three kids who have been cast in the new Harry Potter TV series were announced, I breathed a sigh of relief. My son loves acting, singing and dancing, and like every child in the country who is that way inclined, he auditioned. I’m so glad he didn’t get it, for the obvious child star reasons. Now I’m wondering if I’m a bad mum for even letting him try.

His penchant for jazz hands has led me into a strange alternate universe that feels like a sketch, or Motherland storyline, where this is the norm: the world of the pushy stage parent. The more dedicated ones fork out for dialect coaches, manage their offspring’s professional Instagram accounts, and wave them off cheerfully for months at a time if they get a theatre show tour abroad. They run their kids’ careers like businesses.  

My son goes to classes at a local performing arts centre. It has an actors’ agency attached, which is apparently commonplace, and after a few years they........

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