Children On the continent they love children. Travel with a baby or small child and they are fussed over, talked to and played with. They love the family. Not here in Britain. We are a more private people; sociable, but in more restricted ways. We like to spend time with other people's families, so long as this excludes children, spouses, and grandparents. We like order and calm. "Children should be seen and not heard", goes the old saying. Even if other people keep their children silent, it doesn't mean you get peace and quiet. Instead, the parents burble on and on, reporting mundane things the children did as if they were hilariously funny. In short, we love our own children, but don't care much for anyone else's. Our own children are lively and playful; other people's children are troublesome and badly-behaved. Ours are delightful and entertaining; others are just cheeky and rude. We're pretty good at raising children these days. It seems it wasn't always the case. Pre-war times were hard. If they were poor, children would be caned by their father in cold dark houses. If they were rich, they would be caned by teachers in cold dark boarding schools. We imagine that the children beaten worst proved the toughest characters: they became MPs, judges and important civil servants. They now pay large sums of money to be caned by prostitutes. The post-war baby boom saw things improve. More affluence meant warm houses, better food, and a slap instead of the cane. Typically, mum stayed at home to look after the kids, while dad was out working. Those children now have fond memories of walking to school alone; playing football in the street and having a sly cigarette out of parents' sight; innocently swimming naked in the river while the scoutmaster (a 40-year-old bachelor) watched. Those children are today's parents. Like all parents, they want to avoid mistakes they think their parents made. For example, children are driven to school today. No child would be allowed to walk: it is too dangerous - because the streets are full of parents driving to school. Playing in the street is too dangerous - perhaps there are drug-pushers waiting round the corner out of parents' sight. And as for leaving children exposed to the dangers of drowning, river-borne diseases and potential abusers...! Better keep them inside where we can keep an eye on them. But to make up for this loss of freedom and innocence, many things have improved. Today parenting is no longer instinctive hit-and-miss. Mums and dads read books and magazines which tell them how to make the best parenting use of their limited free time. They can spend hours and hours reading these. It is a standard joke that we bought some fancy toy, but the child spent more time playing with the box. All toys now have to be educational (this suits the children as they can claim that their games console is 'educational'.) Even a cardboard box would be described as an 'educational toy', listing the skills it develops on the side ('visuo-spatial awareness', 'appreciation of textures and colours', etc.) And these days when a child does something wrong, parents don't slap them - they just threaten to take away the games console, which is more effective. The kitchen gallery is an important and relatively recent concept. Go into any family kitchen and it will be festooned with dozens of paintings, drawings and greetings cards daubed by the children. For visitors it is a very useful source of conversation. For the children it makes them feel rewarded and recognised. For the parents it is a useful way of disguising ramshackle old kitchen units. Mothers are no longer tied to the home. They have jobs - partly for self-esteem, but mainly to afford the second car (if the children are school age) or the child care (if not). Child care is not that expensive: £2.50 per hour is a standard rate outside London. But you have to be paid around £3.60 per hour to earn that after tax, which is the level of the proposed new minimum wage. Life for single mothers, who can often only get low-paid jobs, is understandably hard. Things would be easier for working mothers if child care was tax allowable. This will never happen until there are many more women MPs, but just now it is difficult for women to become MPs because they cannot afford the child care. For couples with children, dinner parties and evenings out depend on getting a babysitter. Many are part of local babysitting circles, where each mother will babysit in turn. Being in credit or debit with the babysitting circle is much more important than any account with the bank or credit card company. Otherwise, if grandma can't fill in or lives too far away, it's down to a local babysitter, which we imagine to be a late teenage girl. The image of the babysitter watching television all evening, eating chocolates, and kissing her boyfriend on the sofa, seems innocent naughtiness after the recently publicised stories of babies dying while in the care of nannies both here and in America. The only real advantage of babysitters is that, if you really don't want to visit those relatives, attend that work function or go to that dinner party, the 'can't get a babysitter' excuse is perfect. It's now fashionable for fathers to talk in loving terms about their families. Absent, uncaring dads are out. Men usually now have a few days' paternity leave, so that they can spend valuable days off drinking with their friends and talking about the new pressures of fatherhood. Some even make a token effort helping out - when asked - with some of the parenting chores. But, even in families where both parents work full-time, it's still mum who does virtually all the child care. That, at least, is the same in Britain as it is everywhere else.

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