Whether by accident or design, BBC Radio 4 saw fit to include two very different programmes about parenting in this week's coffee'n'Danish slot.

One, In Praise Of Pushy Parents (Wednesday, 11am), was fronted by shrill-voiced Rosie Millard, who used to be the Beeb's arts correspondent.

The other, Bird Mothers Of The Border (Friday, 11am) was presented by journalist Zoe Williams, who writes about politics and babies.

Williams looked at the issue of mothers returning to work through the prism of the different approaches taken by France and Germany - a prism she squints through from a spot on the border between the countries.

Germany, concerned at its low birth rate, thinks there will be more babies if it encourages women's careers, and looks enviously at France, which has a much higher birth rate, better childcare and a more benign tax system. So there you go: it's the economy, stupid.

Millard's bullish intro - "Picked on by the media! Feared by teachers! Banned from the touchline on sports day! No parent wants to be called pushy ... except me!" - was accompanied by the chugging guitar riff from Eye Of The Tiger.

In case anyone missed the point, this was a reference to the so-called "Tiger Mothers", the famously pushy parents of the Chinese and East Asian communities.

Concerned that listeners might assume her four children go to private school, or that the pushy parent phenomenon is a London sort of thing, Millard stated that a) they don't and b) it isn't.

To prove (b) she headed for Lancashire to talk to teachers and pupils about the issue.

She did make time for a chinwag with a psychologist who told her that exerting undue pressure on children could cause anxiety and depression in adolescence (advice I would hope any parent would file under the heading "Not Rocket Science").

But to uphold the contrary view (ie the one she holds) she dropped in on Andreas Schleicher, a statistician with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and Amy Chua, author of the book which gave the term "Tiger Mother" to the world.

"You see a very strong relationship between the expectations parents place on their children to succeed and the children's response," said Schleicher.

In other words if you push a child hard enough, they'll fall headfirst into a university place.

Chua, meanwhile, made the observation that while western three-year-olds are pottering about doing not very much, their counterparts in Korea, Japan and China were doing music and maths lessons, with predictable consequences for the sort of global league tables PISA produce.

"All the evidence shows," crowed Millard, "that the more engaged parents are with the education of their children - which is another way of saying the more pushy they are - the better their children perform. So get involved!"

Yes, miss. Right away, miss.