To address over-achievement

Do this in winter. The effect of the exercise will be all the more severe. You want this moment to live forever in the memory, but never to be repeated in life.

Wake them early, your children, wrench them from their dreams. Dress them in new and starchy clothing, irritating to the skin and restrictive to movement, applying to the male child a kind of noose, tightened to within several circumferential millimetres of the fatal. Permit no leisurely breakfast, or indeed any moment for contemplation or assimilation to the waking world. About the whole exercise there should be an air of crisis, of near panic. Hurry them from the home and out into the street. It will still be dark.

Scamper them to the station, tripping and hobbling in their new and uncomfortable shoes. Explain carefully as you pour coins into the ticket machine that this is their pocket money. All of their pocket money and then some - they will be repaying the balance over many weeks to come.

When the train arrives force them in among the dense herd of human contents. There will be no seats, nor any window sufficiently nearby to look out of. Several stations later take them off that train, taking care that they glancingly impact on every briefcase and umbrella point on the way to the door. Scuttle them through tunnels, up and downstairs, through apparently impenetrable crowds of oncoming people, maintaining urgency throughout. On another platform, another train, repeat the process.

By the time you reach the surface, in whatever financial district your city possesses, your children should be terrified, dazed, perhaps shivering, but still sentient. You want them to learn from the experience. You want them to understand.

Only now let them rest, ideally placed at some vantage point from which they can see the gadarene trudge of compromised humanity. Direct their gaze to the shuffling columns of commuters, identify for them particular subjects, examples of dead-eyed half-life.

Now you can speak to your children at length, gently, return to them the parent they know and love. Tell them that if they work hard at school, apply themselves in particular to those subjects that seem to promise most in terms of later career and fulfilment of material aspiration, all of this can be theirs. Day after day and year upon year, and only when they are too weak to work, too drained to play, when they no longer recognise their younger selves, will it end.

That should see to it.