But while you might struggle to keep up with some of the more intellectually demanding aspects of life, you gain compensatory, if useless, areas of expertise.

So while I no longer get to watch Andrew Marr grilling politicians on Sunday morning, I could write a thesis on, say, the anti-fascist subtext of Shrek.

Now my child's demands have encroached on my listening pleasure. I haven't yet managed to check out many of the latest cool bands. But I now know all the words to Incy Wincy Spider.

Apparently this puts me in the minority among men.
A survey by the reading charity Booktrust, which has revealed the decline of the nursery rhyme, reports that only 45 per cent of men know Incy Wincy, compared to 78 per cent of women.
(I don't wish to boast, but I can even play Incy Wincy on guitar.)

Booktrust also found that only 36 per cent of respondents regularly used nursery rhymes with their children, and over 20 per cent said they never bothered.
Modern parents think nursery rhymes are 'too old-fashioned'.
My immersion in the ancient art form owes more to my two-year-old's demands than a wish to preserve the nation's heritage through children's folk poetry.
If Zoe loved rock music, that's all she'd hear. But she loves nursery rhymes so, for long stretches of car journeys, that's all we hear.

Those who take an interest in the moral implications of the music we feed our children will have mixed feelings about the passing of nursery rhymes. Forget gangsta rap; the nursery rhyme canon is riddled with violence and death.

Goosey Goosey Gander's lines: "There I met a man who wouldn't say his prayers / So I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs" are apparently an incitement to beat up Catholics.

There's a theory that Ring a Ring o Roses ("A-tishoo, a-tishoo / We all fall down") describes death from the plague.
Oranges and Lemmons' last couplet, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed / Here comes a chopper to chop off your head" was used by George Orwell as a motif in his dystopian classic 1984.

No doubt the darkness in nursery rhymes is cathartic; I suspect that Zoe's fascination with Incy Wincy Spider owes something to the fact that she was once terrified of spiders.
As well as a budding singer-songwriter, Zoe is a ruthless music critic. Strumming my guitar in her presence the other day, she said decisively, 'Don't like that one'.
But I'm in good company. The songwriting partnerships of Jagger/Richards and Lennon/McCartney can earn equally damning verdicts from my two-year-old. Although, in contrast to more senior rock critics, Zoe seems to consider Yellow Submarine the Beatles' most acceptable composition.

And there you have it. Just as she developed her gender-typical obsession with the colour pink without any encouragement from her parents, there's no getting away from the fact that she prefers traditionally childlike songs to anything else.

As long as children respond to certain songs, they'll never die, because parents use what works.
You might be sick to the back teeth of hearing Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star (the most popular children's classic), but if that's what the kids love to hear, that's what you'll find yourself singing.