'They don't call it EuroDisney for nothing,' I have found myself saying in response to inquiries about our post-Easter trip to Disneyland Paris.
It's a minor personal protest couched in a weak gag, the jocose ambiguity enabling a degree of truth to be conveyed without inviting the disfavour of the tyranny of pretence we parents have adopted in the face of globalised entertainment for children.
Other parents look at me as though I have just uttered something slightly profane, which in a way I have.
Then they grin and nod and rub their thumbs and forefingers together in a way that bizarrely reminds me of how, as schoolchildren, we would blow on our hands to indicate to one another that we had been caned. "Lots of readies, eh?" I nod and we leave it at that.
Because of the conventions of the tyranny, nobody warns you in advance about what Disneyland is going to be like.
To observe wryly that it is an elaborate machine for separating parents from hard currency would be an understatement, yes, but more importantly tantamount to an admission in the presence of another parent that you value money before the happiness of your children.
To mention the queues for the rides or the difficulty in obtaining a meal that is not deep-fried would be to label yourself a grouch and a curmudgeon, someone incapable of entering the wondrous spirit of the age.
The obligatory response to all inquiries is an enthusiastically delivered superlative: "Fabulous!", or "Oh I love Disneyland", or "Haven't you been yet?" This is the trap of modern parenthood. The collective guilt we all the time experience on account of feeling, not all that deep down, that we are inadequate parents can only be temporarily assuaged by giving our children more of the things we secretly worry may be afflicting them with an insatiable appetite for sensation.
Trapped in the same boat, we seek to reassure one another that there is nothing to worry about. Parenthood is a state of lived compromise.
If you'd asked me 20 years ago what kind of parent I might become I would have painted a radically different picture (no McDonald's, fizzy drinks or TV) to the reality that has emerged in the past decade. But to pursue such a singular vision of childrearing in a world in which youth culture is almost entirely created in a central production unit would be a form of cruelty. Parenting is no longer something ordained by parents, but a role defined by global marketing.
I know a few parents who have tried to hold out on their absolute principles, but they fight losing battles with peer pressure and advertising, and their children seem to spend their spare time watching cartoons in other people's houses.
Most of us, knowing when we are beat, are content with containment. It isn't that EuroDisney is manifestly bad for your children or even demonstrably poor value for money. In some ways it is a fun place to go, expect not as much fun as other parents tell you, and probably, all in all, not quite worth the hassle of getting there. It costs €43 for a one-day child ticket and €53 for a one-day adult ticket, which might be reasonable value if you could get around to everything in a single day. But the crowds are so big, and the queues so long (an average of an hour-and-a-half for the more interesting rides), that you are left by lunchtime with a sense that you still haven't seen anything.
This leads you to spend the rest of the day resigning yourself to the prospect of coming back again tomorrow or next school holidays.
There are lots of fun things to see and do, like the earthquake simulation which causes the tour train to rock alarmingly while 250,000 gallons of water are dumped from above; or the Swiss Family Robinson tree-house which, though made of concrete, manages to evoke the spirit of the story in quite a powerful way.
But the amount to be seen and the distances to be walked turns the whole affair into a bit of a chore, a programme to be achieved and a list to be checked off against a ticking clock that can only win.
In the end, you mainly register the things you don't get to see, which the tyranny instantly converts into inadequate-parenting points.
From time to time it was necessary to remind ourselves that we were enjoying ourselves.
Scrutinising the faces of our fellow consumers, we invariably observed a dogged intent that undoubtedly mirrored something in our own faces - not at all like the smiling happy faces in the adverts.
And most people, in an effort to dispel the encroaching guilt and buy some parenting redemption, seemed to end up doing what we ended up doing: joining slightly shorter queues to buy souvenirs of something we mostly never got to experience. My daughter insists she had a great time, but children have their own tyrannies. I wonder.