And still the toddler screamed. He had not fallen off the swings or fought with another child. No one had stolen his toys. He was not upset, frightened or hurt. He just screamed.

Everyone in the playground stopped talking and watched. So Henrietta Leighton, his mother, smacked him. The response, as she expected, was immediate. But it was also dramatic in a way she did not expect.

'Paul stopped screaming right away, just like he usually does when he has these episodes,' Leighton said. 'I hate hitting him but it's a very deliberate and considered response that my husband and I have discussed at length. There's no way we would do it if we thought it would harm him.'

That's not how the other parents in the playground saw it, however, and since that day many of the parents Leighton thought of as friends have refused to talk to or even look at her - one mother revealed that many thought what she did was child abuse.

Leighton finds their response frustrating and upsetting but she thinks she understands. 'There's a sense of all-pervasive anxiety about the devastating and long-lasting damage that can be done to children that leaves parents constantly looking over their shoulder,' she said. 'This isn't how parenting was for my mother and father. This is very different.'

The way parents choose to raise their children has never been more of a burning issue; last week's launch of Dad, a glossy new magazine funded by the Department of Trade and Industry, is just the latest in a long line of government-funded initiatives delving increasingly deeper into the family home. Critics complain of a nanny state gone mad.

The advice thrown at parents doesn't end with the literature churning out of government offices; an entire publishing industry has been spawned on the back of increasing parental anxiety, with more and more books appearing on the shelves each year.

Parenting books have been one of publishing's strongest genres for decades but in recent years their popularity has rocketed with shops such as Borders and Books Etc reporting a 30 per cent rise in both sales and the number of titles on offer.

'There's been an enormous rise in the number of books being published that lay down the law to parents on every detail involved in bringing up their children,' said Virginia Hume, a writer with two young daughters who specialises in analysing the child advice industry.

'Lots of these books quickly get transferred from the bookshop shelves to the remainder piles, but if any author has a slightly different angle on parenting they can get their book published at the moment. The publishers have never been so open,' she said. And parents have proved a fertile market; where they used to buy just one Dr Spock-like tome to cover every eventuality, now the industry can't produce too many or too varied titles to satisfy their hunger. In the past two years, according to Nielson BookScan's General Retail Market survey, almost half a million books on parenting were sold in the UK.

Frank Furedi, a sociologist and author of Paranoid Parenting, said: 'The advice industry for parents has exploded in the last few years and at the same time it has dramatically expanded its brief into highly specific areas that would have been considered too minor or intimate to be addressed in years gone by. There's no aspect of child rearing that is not the subject of some new advice and so-called expertise.'

In an overcrowded marketplace, with books jostling for space, it is the more prescriptive ones that are becoming more influential. Gina Ford's number one bestseller, The Contented Little Baby Book, has sold more than 60,000 copies in the past two years to parents eager to adopt its rigid daily timetable, dictating the times babies should sleep, wake and eat.

But Furedi believes that instead of producing a generation of well-read, secure parents who feel sufficiently prepared for every bombshell their little angel might throw at them, the advice industry is having the opposite effect and is shattering parents' confidence in their ability to care for their children.

'The advice industry has created a relationship of dependency where parents are turned into supplicants, asking to be told how to behave from even before the moment of conception,' he said.

Hume agrees, pointing out that parenting books are not only becoming increasingly prescriptive but also delivering apocalyptic warnings concerning what will happen to a child if the parent doesn't follow their programme to the letter.

'These books take extreme examples of children who have had a particular parenting experience and gone on to have terrible lives,' said Hume. 'They then generalise that case to every child and parent, powerfully implying that if you don't follow their advice, your children will suffer the same dreadful future.'

Steve Biddulph's bestselling The Secret of Happy Children warns parents that there is a strong likelihood that they are unconsciously 'hypnotising [their] children into disliking themselves, and causing them to have problems which may last a lifetime'.

Biddulph is not alone; in Laying Down the Law: 25 Laws of Parenting Dr Ruth Peters introduces Corrie, a 15-year-old boy with serious drug and violence problems, then adds; 'Most parents I see are just too wimpy for their own welfare or that of their children ... [but] if you follow my prescriptions, not only will you raise a kind, responsible child but you're bound to enjoy your family life much much more.

'Learn my 25 rules, understand them and follow them and you will keep your family from turning into a chaotic, dysfunctional mess,' she adds.

The only solution to the current glut of advice, according to Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, is to give more, not less, help for parents - but help of a very different sort to that currently available.

'Parents need positive help to understand the changing world their children are facing and the choices they're having to make,' he said. 'We need advice on how to nurture our children, not control them.'

Maxine Lattimer read every advice book she could find before giving birth to the first of her two sons two and a half years ago. 'It seemed like I bought a new title every time I went out,' she said. 'I had so many books that I was inculcated into believing there was only one way of being a good mother.'

Now pregnant with her third child, Lattimer has thrown her books away, blaming them for making her feel such a failure during her first two births that she suffered brief periods of depression. 'These books make you feel like a complete failure if you can't deal with your child, despite all the experts' precise and painstaking advice,' she said.

'I lost all confidence in making my own choices about what was best for my babies. Parents have to have confidence that they are the best people to make decisions for their own children. Without that confidence you can never have a happy child - or a happy parent.'