Do you harbour dreams that your budding ballerina or your mini Michael Flatley will hit the big time? If you do, be assured you're not the first. The stardust stairway to fame is peopled with ambitious parents - mainly mothers who pushed their offspring to the front and got their cute little faces and twinkling toes noticed by the casting-director.

Shirley Temple, now 79, making her stage debut at three, had her career advanced by an overly ambitious mother. All through the depression, Shirley wooed the hearts of America - and made a neat pile for 20th Century Fox. But she lost her cutesy appeal in her teens and subsequent films together with her first marriage flopped. Then, finally and wisely, she swapped the silver screen for the world's stage when Nixon appointed her ambassador to the UN.

Judy Garland was slotted into the family vaudeville show when she was three. By 13, she was propelled by her mother towards an MGM contract which produced mega-bucks for the studio. In adulthood, she turned to drugs and alcohol and, in 1969, died in penury. The youngest, contemporary casualty in all this is Macaulay Culkin who, at 16, is a confused millionaire, thanks to his ambitious father.

But does this ambitious trend exist in Ireland as well? Do we hide our offspring's talent under a bushel or do we rub two and two together and make lame? Betty Ann Norton's acting school has been going for 34 years and in all that time, she has never come across a pushy parent: "We make it clear from the start. I interview all the parents and try to find out their motives in enrolling their child. It helps as you get to know more about the family background. But we couldn't possibly have parents nosing around back-stage. Anyway, we don't get them. Maybe you have them more in the dance situation."

Jill Doyle of Dublin's Performing Arts School hasn't really had any pushy parents either: "We stress that the classes are to help the children's self-confidence and poise. If they go for an audition, that's part of the experience but not a very important part. And if they get a part then we tell them that's a bonus. It's not the reason why they're with us."

So where are these stage-mothers from hell? After all, they must exist. Joyce has celebrated one of them - if celebrate is the right word - with his short story, A Mother, in which Mrs Kearney, determined her young daughter will be properly paid for her job as a concert accompanist, makes her feelings clear: My daughter has her contract. She will get four pounds eight into her hand or a foot she won't put on that platform.

And who hasn't roared with laughter to hear Maureen Potter's monologue about the mother putting her son Christie in for the feis, trampling other competitors underfoot in her attempt to bring "Criostor" to the notice of the adjudicator?

Billie Barry, who has been on the Dublin dance scene for more than so years and whose pantomimes at the Gaiety are legendary, has plenty of experience of parents: "Most mothers just want the children to be happy. You get some, of course, who can be a bit pushy, telling the child to get up to the front when they're on stage, or always trying to talk to Gay Byrne, if we're on the Late Late. And they tell you their child can do Riverdanee and everything. Oh can they, I say, then they can teach ..... . I was over in London once and there was a child getting above herself and the American producer tore up the contract in front of her: "That's what we do with bold children, he said. But parents here are great."

Jill Doyle thinks the same and says that one of the main things the children get from coming to dance school is the socialising: "And the parents enjoy the social bit as well." Certainly, the Sunday morning I dropped in, the place was alive with children - from minute tots in pink leotards perilously strutting their stuff to serious teenagers learning their lines. The coffee bar was full of chatting parents and that included a fair number of fathers who, with baby carriers in hand, were collecting or delivering older children.

The ideal parent, according to all the dance and acting schools is one who drops their children at the door of the school, steers clear of the Green Room when there's a show on and helps out with the driving and chaperoning.

Mairead McFadden falls into this category. Her daughter Susan first walked the boards of the Gaiety when she was five, in a Billie Barry show. Two years later, she and her brother Brian - three years older - appeared in the Wizard Of Oz and three years ago she played the title role in Annie. Mairead's job throughout has been clear-cut: "Chauffeuring. You keep out of the way, drop them off, go home, watch the clock for 10 o'clock, then go and collect them. They'd be giving out if you hung around."

Downstairs in the dance studio, Brian - a handsome, man-sized 17-year-old, is practising with his class. He does jazz and tap and last year had a part in RTE's Fin bar's Class. Billie Barry has a policy of teaching the very small boys separately from the girls: We want them to dance like boys. Before, they always followed the girls, on tippy-toes. But boys should show strength in their dancing."

Two small boys still discovering the joys of dance and acting are brothers Jack (5) and Sam (7), sons of Martina and Nick Toner: As they go to an all-boys school we thought we'd send them to the Performing Arts School so they could get some experience of a mixed school. Then they went for an audition and got it and so far, they've been in a film, a musical and done some ads including the Eircell ad."

DIARMAID Lawlor, a pupil with Betty Ann Norton, is 13 now and has appeared at the Gate as Boy, in Waiting For Godot. "I started him at four," says Grainne Lawlor, "because I wanted him to learn to speak well and also to get some confidence. He's also been on at the Peacock and has often been on Glen roe." The money he earns has been put away in the post office for him.

The stress area, for children and parents alike - and the one most likely to bring forth the stage-mother in all her zeal - is the feis.

Philip McTaggart, who teaches in the McTaggart School of Dancing in Cork, says that when he started teaching eight years ago, an old hand told him: "The best child to teach is an orphan." When it comes to feiseanna, it seems, competitiveness shows itself in tooth and claw.

"At the moment, I'm teaching 10 children aged four to 12," he says, "all of them blissfully ignorant of competitiveness and long may it be."

It's when he gets competitive parents that he has problems - not that he gets many: "I think most teachers just put up with them. You have to, for the child's sake, especially if the child is talented."

But talent or not, be warned about pushing your child beyond endurance. Drew Barrymore appeared in ET when she was six and is currently appearing in Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You. Her manager/mother had her in a puppy food commercial at 11 months. By nine, she was on alcohol and by 12, cocaine. Now 22, she has survived the hell that was her childhood but she no longer talks to her mother.