Terence Blacker’s latest novel for nine to 12-year-olds, ParentSwap, contains the idea of an agency that allows children to swap their parents for better ones. He is aware that one of the most compelling childhood fantasies is the possibility of ridding yourself of your family. “Our culture is always telling children that they matter too, and deserve better. What if children who thought their parents were letting them down decided to do something about it?” Watching the reality TV show Wife Swap was one of the triggers for the novel. “In some programmes the children were obviously upset by what was going on. Their lives were turned upside down for the sake of television. I wanted to write a book from a child’s point of view about the ways adults exploit children.”

This explains the second central idea of Blacker’s comic satire: that the swap is part of a reality show. His hero, 12-year-old Danny Bell, is a perfect target for exploitative programme makers who con him into the existence of a real parent swapping agency. He is the son of an absentee mother, gone off to find herself, and of a useless slob of an old rock star who hardly leaves the sofa. Danny, left with responsibility for meals, housework and siblings, hankers for routine and boundaries.

A narrative told partly in interviews with the characters, like those Big Brother debriefings with housemates, allows the reader to understand that Danny has been set up, well before he deduces that he is being watched. Which is when he takes his revenge.

But first Danny tries two new families. The first is the kind many parents aspire to: secure, supportive, organised and normal, offering regular family meals and help (but not too much) with homework. But, as Blacker says, “like a lot of people the Harrisons have been sent bonkers by parenthood”. Their fatal flaw is that they believe parents always know best, as expressed in the chart on their wall that shows what their daughter will be doing until she is 22.

Danny shakes them up a bit and goes on to choose a family with more obvious child appeal: rich and famous, with tennis courts and big cars. But they are self- interested and manipulative, and their children are merely designer accessories through whom they show off their success.

So if neither of Danny’s choices is ideal, what should parents be like? Blacker does not suggest he has all the answers. He is the divorced father of grown-up children, Xan, 28, and Alice, 26, who were too diplomatic when quizzed about his failings to send him the expected three-page e-mail. “Any marriage that ends in divorce you can’t feel too smug about,” he says, but “now, faced with two nice adults, you erase the messy bits”.

The book is, he says, “an exploration of parenthood”, motivated, he admits, partly by his own experience of being mostly unparented, in common with everyone who goes away to boarding school at eight. (His father was in the army.) “I had a huge inferiority complex as a parent because I hadn’t had the messy, domestic childhood that I was going to impose on my children. I assumed I was going to be pretty bad at it.”

In fact Blacker seems like just the sort of parent kids want (give or take a divorce after they’d reached adulthood). As a writer, he was around, working at home. The family lived in an idyllic house in Suffolk, and there were exciting holidays. His daughter rode — and he had been an amateur jockey. Besides, he’s cool and funny. He sings and plays the guitar, and both this novel and his previous one, Boy2Girl, end with rock concerts that contain his own songs.

There’s something of the ageing rock star about him, an image that he cements by saying that he was the slob half of his marriage. His ex-wife, Caroline, was the organised one. However, he admits, with definite unslobbiness, that he thinks the job of a parent is “to take the unpopular line”. There’s a case, he thinks, for some nagging, about, say, piano practice – because “learning something does actually require work”.

The important thing in parenting is “not to have a mad plan”. If there is a message in his books it’s to “allow the children to be themselves and not try and impose your style, regime, ambitions on them”.

Blacker admits that children’s fiction is full of unsatisfactory parents, so he wanted to introduce at least one parental role model. To his surprise, given his republicanism, this character was the Queen, who comes out of his book as very sensitive. “She took on a life of her own,” says Blacker sheepishly, “but then she’s been to hell and back. She understands heartbreak.”

In ParentSwap it is Danny who saves his own father. Blacker’s experience is that children are often more capable and resilient than parents expect. “I’m amazed by the children that get through. The truth is you can think: ‘There’s a Priory case in the making in 15 years; there is a nervous breakdown by the age of 25, or a junkie in a bedsit by the age of 27’. And then, of course, they turn out to be perfect and fine and particularly nice in a rather annoying way. They should have cracked up. There’s no justice.”

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