I WISH you’d made me work harder at my French,” my eldest son moaned the other day.

He didn’t do as well as he should have and now, in his early 20s, regrets it.

I am clearly one of those Northern parents Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield is complaining about. Apparently, unlike our Southern counterparts, we are not as sharp-elbowed as we should be in pushing our children to get top grades.

I didn’t play Beethoven to mine in the womb before their ears developed, nor did I wave flashcards in front of their eyes before they had learnt the alphabet. More Bagpuss than tiger mum, my relaxed style of mothering evolved out of necessity, because I didn’t have time to hover over each of my five boys like a demented hummingbird.

I had better things to do on Wednesday evenings than repeatedly peel four-year-old Patrick’s limpet-like body off my legs in order to throw him, wailing, into the pool. So we gave up swimming lessons and he caught up with his brothers in the summer holidays instead. Similarly, after months of six-year-old Albert feigning illness to avoid piano lessons, I caved in when he begged me to tell his teacher, who lived across the road, that he had died. A tiger mum would have persisted, but I reckoned, given he would rather fake his own death and lay low for the next 12 years, it was unlikely he was ever going to make it as a concert pianist.

While I enjoyed watching the boys winning at sport, I was never too despondent when they lost or were knocked out early. Far from rushing to improve their skills with extra tennis lessons or berate the cricket coach for not doing a good enough job, I was usually just glad we could go home at last. Once they got to secondary school, I could back off even further, deliberately refusing to organise their PE kit or text books for school every morning. And, while always encouraging them to try their best, I only rarely helped them with homework if they asked.

Partly, this was because I didn’t have time. But also, I consoled myself, it was about helping them develop self-reliance and initiative.

Having initially suffered detentions for arriving at school ill-prepared, they soon sorted themselves out. Each of them discovered subjects they excelled at, and others which were a struggle. Failure, on occasion, was a lesson in itself. They learnt to cope. And being aware of their strengths and weaknesses also provided a useful insight into career paths they might be most suited to.

Anne Longfield is rightly concerned about the widening attainment gap between North and South at secondary school level. It’s something that deserves further scrutiny. But blaming Northern parents for not being assertive or aspirational enough seems the easy way out.

It could be more to do with the fact Northern secondary schools are funded an average of £1,300 a pupil less than in London. Maybe the Government’s failure to improve schools, or recruit and train enough teachers, has played a part.

And there are other factors to consider in our increasingly competitive culture, where children feel they must be best in their class and schools are pushed to be top of the league tables – condemning the majority, ultimately, to failure.

According to the Sutton Trust, more than three times as many state-educated children in London have private tuition compared to those in Yorkshire. Grades at GCSE and A-level are higher in the South-East, but so is the demand for children’s mental health services.

The Young Minds charity warns the number of children receiving counselling for exam stress has tripled in a year. And the number admitted to hospital because of self-harm has risen 68 per cent in ten years. We have the most tested children in Europe, and also some of the unhappiest in the world. An international survey of children’s wellbeing found the UK ranked 13th out of 15 countries for children’s life satisfaction and 15th for self-confidence.

Unlike many tiger mums, I don’t think a string of A*s, along with extra-curricular Mandarin and at least a Grade 6 cello, constitutes success. And, with two sons still at secondary school, whatever Anne Longfield says, I don’t intend changing tack now.

True, I didn’t wield a stick over my eldest’s head while forcing him to conjugate his regular French verbs, nor did I pay £25 an hour for a private tutor to bring him up to speed. I just asked him to try his best. And he didn’t. But I believe his experience of failure and subsequent regret has taught him so much more than throwing money at the problem in order to help boost a mediocre grade would ever have done.