‘Oh you just wait’, various parents of teenagers have said to me, ‘Just you wait’. I’ve pressed them on what exactly is so bad about teenagers, but haven’t heard anything that sounds too awful. Specific examples have included: ’They eat you out of house and home’. Hmmmm, better than two-hour lunch-a-thons where you try in vain to interest tot in more than a mouthful of organic, home-cooked five-vegetable spaghetti bolognaise. ‘They’d sleep all day if they could!’ Again, no sympathy – we all know newborns and toddlers would be awake all night if left to their own devices.

Anyway, as night follows day, isn’t it a teenager’s job to rebel against a parent? Look at Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous – the ultra-sensible cardigan-wearer to her mother’s ill-advised hot pants and boob tubes ensembles, muddled together while under the influence of too much Bollinger. At the other end of the scale there’s Katy Perry, chucking her evangelical preacher father’s teachings out of the window, and (according to Dad) following ‘Satan’s path’ with ditties such as ‘I Kissed a Girl’.

I thought that we were supposed to do the opposite of anything our parents get up to, part of an evolutionary rite of passage to ensure that the world isn’t solely populated by Archers-listening baldies wearing easy-iron shirts.

So what’s with Lourdes Ciccone being so darned cool? Instead of designing her own Material Girl clothing range, shouldn’t she be staring at her mother and declaiming, ‘You are sooooo embarassing in those Adidas pants, mum, and what’s with the trilby?’ How come she’s not suing her father, a personal trainer to the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, for giving her ‘body issues’? And why isn’t she chucking the macrobiotic mung beans out of the fridge in favour of burgers, while proclaiming her right to get spotty?

I tell you, kids aren’t what they used to be. And I’m jealous. Madonna seems to be doing a fantastic job of bringing up her daughter. Lourdes is clearly never going to have a nine-to-five kind of existence, but is, by all accounts, a polite little jet-setter. Judging by her early entrepreneurial streak and her blog, she’s inherited her mother’s work ethic, as well as her sense of style. And she looks fabulous. Mum and daughter are often papped while wearing the same striped top or leather jacket, and you can imagine them swapping style tips over the breakfast egg white omelette.

It’s just not right. Someone should tell them that they’re supposed to be slamming doors in each other’s faces, not partying hand in hand at the same venues.

Madonna, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, get Lourdes making jam and listening to Radio 4. She’s going to rebel at some point, so you might as well give her something to react to. Otherwise she might surprise you by enrolling in a Classics degree and learning how to tap dance.

Last night, I watched a TV program that’s become an endangered species. Cutting Edge: Four Sons versus Four Daughters was a reality show, but – hold the front page – it didn’t try to humiliate the people it was filming.  What’s more, the people concerned were two middle class families, leading lives of uncomplicated happiness somewhere in middle England. Where was the angst, the secrets, the affair with the tennis coach? Each family had four children of the same sex, and the show swapped parents for the weekend to see how different their lives might have been. 

The show’s producers had obviously been briefed to find the UK’s most gender-stereotypical families. The four girls did hours of dance lessons each week, had a house filled with My Little Ponies,and couldn’t stop painting the fingernails of anything that didn’t move – even big burly dad, the haulage contractor, was regularly subjected to makeovers. Over on the boys’ side, it was endless football, plastic guns and go-kart racing. Both mothers worked part-time, and were very happy with their lot. As were the dads. In short, there wasn’t much of a story. And the story there was could be condensed into: ‘Mums of girls get to go shopping. Mums of boys get to watch football’. As a documentary, it could have been so much more.

I’m a mother of four boys, and was dying to see if I’d watch the program secretly seething with jealousy about life with glorious girls. Perhaps a life policing games of goodies and baddies wasn’t actually as much fun as I seemed to think. However, I laughed at the makeovers and the messy pink bedrooms, though admitted that the girls looked sweet doing their ballet lessons. They were also a lot quieter than the boys, and smiled and chatted all the time. But seven hours of watching wobbly infant arabesques a week? I realised I probably had more in common with the mother of boys who was quite happy to watch her sons and husband hurl themselves around a go-kart circuit, while feeling no need to join in the ‘fun’ herself. There was a moment when the burly dad of girls, who runs a second-generation family haulage business from the bottom of the garden, seemed as though he was going to point to his collection of diggers and trucks and sigh about his daughter’s lack of interest in them. But he admitted that he wasn’t sure he’d have chosen a career in haulage for himself anyway, and really didn’t mind that his daughters were unlikely to take over.

I’m not saying I wanted a fist fight and parents breaking down over their lack of a son or daughter. But it would have been nice to ask the children what they thought of their new parents for the weekend. I’d also like to have got into the issues of education – are boys as backward as generally reported when it comes to schooling? And are mothers of boys more likely to allow their offspring to get away with doing household chores?

Cutting Edge documentaries are generally lauded as watercooler TV. In this instance, I can’t imagine anyone getting wound up by the show’s conclusion which revealed that both sets of parents were extremely lucky, had wonderful kids, and ‘Wouldn’t have it any other way’. On the plus side, we spend so much time hearing about shoddy parenting, and people dashing to the States for gender selection, that it was nice to hear that what you get couldn’t be more wonderful. I’m just not sure we need a slightly feeble documentary to remind us of the joy of parenthood.