As I sat in the audience at the award ceremony, my heart was thumping and my palms were moist with anticipation. I was about to find out if all my hard work had paid off. Moments later, when the name of the winner was announced, I felt that familiar surge of elation.
Yet it was not me getting up to accept the prize for the Year Two science project. It was my seven-year-old daughter, Lily. But it was me who had stood over her to make sure it was up to scratch. Now, as Lily accepted her book token from the head teacher, it was all so familiar.
After all, this was how it had been for me. I had won my first prize for English when I was around the same age, and after that I was hooked, landing one every single year until I left school.
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Under pressure: Tanith and her daughter Lily, who she used to push to do well at school
For me, these accolades were the public signs of success that lit the way to getting a place at a top university and making it possible for me to fulfil my ambition of becoming a journalist and author.
Now, it looked as though Lily was following in my footsteps - or so I thought. But when I found her after the ceremony, my daughter was in floods of tears, wanting to hand back her prize. She was unable to explain why, other than to say she hated all the fuss.
It had never been my intention to pressurise my child. As a high-flyer who had done well at school, I'd expected her to work as hard as I had done.
There was one key difference. As a child, I was left to my own devices by my parents. These days, schooling is so much more competitive that I felt I had to intervene to make sure Lily did her best.
But that success came at a personal cost. Instead of letting Lily have playtime, our time together became an endless round of workbooks. I couldn't even bake cakes with her without wanting to teach her about weighing and measuring.
However, though I was driven from a young age, my daughter simply wasn't. Innately modest, Lily didn't want to excel at everything. The pressure to do so meant she didn't want to try at all.
Worse, she started to see me less as a mother and more as a ring-master. She stopped looking me in the eye and became irritable and secretive about school.
Homework became the flashpoint. For someone like me, who generally did twice as much as the teacher asked, it was frustrating to see her trying to get away with doing next to nothing. I wanted to give her the benefit of my experience, but Lily heard my suggestions only as criticisms.
It was not that I wanted to be pushy, although it may have looked like it from the outside as I forked out for Kumon maths courses and £75-an-hour tutors.
All work and no play: Homework became a flashpoint for Tanith and her daughter and they had no fun together (posed by models)
When none of that worked, in desperation I consulted a parenting counsellor, thinking she would meet Lily and get to the bottom of it for me. But after listening to me on the phone, she said it wasn't my daughter she needed to see. It was me.
At her office the following week, she diagnosed the problem.
'You seem very stressed', she told me. 'Do you think that might be the cause of some of Lily's resistance?'
I could only agree. Although I worked from home as a writer, to be with Lily and her younger sister, Clio, I was still competing in the pressurised media industry and had to work round the clock.
The most stressful time coincided with the period between school pick-up and bedtime. Just as I was trying to defuse Lily's tantrums over homework, I was getting calls that couldn't wait from editors. No wonder the tension levels at home were rising.
I even wrote a book called How to be an Amazing Mum - When You Just Don't Have the Time.
And while it contained lots of practical tips, like how to put together a school lunch-box in less than a minute, looking back I can see it was also a cri de coeur. All the time-saving tricks in the world couldn't stem the constant feeling that my brain was about to burst.
Yet still my workaholic tendencies and need for success, kept driving me. In the space of a single year, when Clio was four and Lily seven, I published no fewer than three books. To keep up, I started viewing breaks as a chance to catch up on work, rather than immerse myself in my family.
But in my drive to provide materially for my girls, I was missing the fact that it was not just me who was paying the price for my career. My daughters were, too.
Too much, too soon: Many young children are feeling stressed out thanks to their pushy parents
Now I'd had my eyes opened to the effect my work was having on my children, I started to look at life through their eyes. I imagined how frightening it must be for a child, who relies on its parents for everything, to see their care-givers so overwhelmed.
It was painful to admit that doing what I thought was best for my girls was harming them.
Indeed, animal and human studies find that when parents are stressed, their offspring are stressed, too. Baby rats, for example, are more fearful if their mothers are too busy to lick them and calm them down.
In humans, babies who sense their mothers' anxiety feel more pain from injections, studies have found.
Nor does our shortage of time make the periods we do have with our children more special. One analysis found that when parents try to make up for lost time, they're more bossy and intense. No wonder children's charity YoungMinds estimates nearly one million children aged five to 15 have mental health problems such as anxiety.
The bleak truth, is that no matter how good our intentions, stress and overwork make us poor parents.
Counsellor David Code, author of Kids Pick Up On Everything: How Parental Stress Is Toxic To Kids, wanted to get to the bottom of why affluent, well-educated people, who followed parenting guidebooks to the letter - and showered their children with love - were not necessarily producing emotionally healthy children.
He had assumed that when kids developed behavioural problems, it was these problems that made the family tense. On closer inspection, he discovered a family was often tense before the child developed an emotional issue.
Code believes the most important thing we can provide for our children is a calm environment.
But in order to get off the carousel of being constantly busy, I had to understand the reasons I became a workaholic.
I started to wonder why whatever professional heights I reached, nothing was ever enough.
When I looked back on my past, I realised that the top marks I'd got at school had just been distractions from the misery that followed my parents' bitter divorce.
I was thankful Lily did not have that void to fill. She's lucky to have a secure childhood under the protection of two parents who always try to put her needs first.
But unless I found a better balance, I realised I was creating more problems. Children of workaholics tend either to copy them - or are so scared off by seeing what it does to their parents they don't even want to try.
Sitting back: Now Tanith has learnt to not to push her daughter to follow in her footsteps as a writer
So I had to change. When Lily moved to secondary school, we sent her to an excellent state academy instead of continuing with private education, reducing the financial pressure on our family and allowing me to work less.
I took steps to lighten up our relationship, have more fun and spend more time together in which we did nothing very much.
I tried a technique called Lovebombing, devised by the psychologist Oliver James, to reset the emotional temperature between us. It involved spending time alone with Lily, and offering her unlimited love in order to re-establish trust between us.
The idea is that by freeing her from being constantly controlled, it would take us back to the closeness we had before resentment set in.
It involved going away for the weekend with Lily and letting her decide what we did. Of course, it sounds mad to give a child total freedom, because parents are taught that in order to make children behave, we have to give them more rules, not fewer. But it's only for a short space of time, and Lily made perfectly reasonable requests.
Last year, she decided on a weekend at a hotel in Brighton. She wanted to walk on the pier, and eat candy floss and fish and chips on the beach.
Later, she wanted to stay up late and cuddle up with me in our hotel room while we watched two of her favourite movies. I left my laptop at home and turned my mobile off - and it was quite simply the best weekend ever.
The impact of our time away was immediate and dramatic. It was as if the wall that had gone up between us had been dismantled and we could see one other again.
Since I stopped pushing her, Lily's motivation has come back and, now 12, she is succeeding in her own way - by playing the violin - not in mine.
For all those prizes I won in the past, I realise there is no award that comes close to the elation of being the mother of a happy child.
- Tanith's new book is Taming The Tiger Parent: How to Put Your Child's Wellbeing First In A Competitive World is published on September 18 by Little, Brown, £8.99.
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