A good read but completely irrelevant to my life now.I found the bit about Jo Frost interesting and I happened to watch one of her Super Nanny programmes where a young woman married to an ex-marine policeman was having trouble controlling her children when he was out doing his job. When he came back from a day's policing the children behaved  perfectly  with both parents because of his very disciplined and no-nonsense demeanour

I thought this was a simple case of the man conferring authority on to the mother. The policeman husband should have just told the kids that when he is out of the house if they do anything that bothers their mum it will bother him and there will be big trouble. I have done something similar but too a much lesser degree with my own lads from time to time. Interesting that Jo Frost did not recommend this because she concentrates on individual solutions to childcare problems when most of them happen because of lack of unity between the mum and dad.

I think the phrase I used with my lads was, and I must stress this was very occasionally, "Cross your mum and you cross me". I saw it as an empowerment gesture for my very fine wife.