Just last week I left my children, aged eight, six and four, at home alone. I only needed to buy the papers and it was just too much of a faff to find all their shoes and get them in the car when I’d only be gone, at most, for five minutes.

Of course I was in a total panic about it. Sure, I’d asked the neighbour to keep an ear out, I’d written down my mobile phone number and I’d explained where the gun was, and how it could be speed-loaded should someone unsavoury come to the door.

But despite these extensive precautions I still came back expecting to find them either in the fire or in white slavery in Turkmenistan.

So, like everyone else, I was horrified to learn this week that two mothers had left their kids at home while they went off, not for the papers, but for a holiday.

One woman had arrived at Manchester airport where she found her son needed a passport (yeah, right), so she’d put him in a taxi and sent him home. The other had gone skiing. Dreadful. What’s the world coming to? Something must be done.

However, let’s stop and think for a moment. The children left behind were 11 and 12 and, while this may seem young to those of us of a forty-ish disposition, we have to face the fact that today 11 is the new 17.

If I’d been left at home alone when I was 11, I’d have been dead of hunger or electrocution within the hour. Come to think of it, if I were left at home aged 42 there’d be the same result in the same sort of time frame.

We might like to think of an 11-year-old as some newborn foal, all slimy and incapable with wobbly legs, but it’s not that long ago that 11-year-olds were skilled in the art of mining and pickpocketry. And nothing’s changed.

Today, most 11-year-olds can make a roach, hot-wire a car, outrun the police, fight an entire army of aliens, drink a bottle of vodka without being sick and operate a digital satellite transceiver. So they should have no trouble at all with a microwave and a tin opener.

Certainly, most 11-year-olds are far better able to fend for themselves than most 80-year-olds. And the state has no qualms about leaving them all by themselves for week after interminable week with no pension and no reliable means of reaching the lavatory on time.

Can an 80-year-old program a television or understand packet food? Can an 80-year-old afford the heating bills? Not usually.

Of course an 11-year-old cannot afford heating bills either but at least he can hack into the power company’s accounts and adjust his bill to nought.

Furthermore, you should put yourself in the shoes of the 11-year-old. At home. Alone. Over Christmas. For an 80-year-old this is hell on earth, but for an 11-year-old it’s about as close to heaven as you can get while your heart is still beating.

No hirsute old ladies queuing up to kiss you on the mouth. No Queen’s broadcast to the nation.

No sprouts. No Boxing Day parties with people “from the village”, no need to wait until Christmas morning to play with your new X-Box game, and no need to worry that someone might want to watch television instead.

No need to open presents which you know are jumpers. No being dragged off to church on Christmas Eve. Put your feet on the furniture, dig out Mum’s X-rated videos, wonder who Joe Strummer was and set the garage to loud.

And because you can eat what you want, where you want, with your fingers, while slouching, and with your elbows on the table, there will be no family rows and no volcanic explosions as, for the only time in a whole year, a family is forced to coexist in a small space for a long time.

I don’t want to be bah-humbug about this. I love the idea of a Christmas around the tree, watching my children unwrap their presents and settling down after lunch to watch Steve McQueen on his motorcycle. But those days are gone and they won’t be back.

Let’s not forget that today is the past that people in the future dream about.

The fact is that I’m with my children for a maximum of 15 minutes a day, and this is no match for the constant bombardment they get on Radio 1 from Sara Cox and the Cheeky Girls. I want my eight-year-old to be a good girl. But over Christmas I learn she wants to be a “teenage dirtbag baby”.

So, I suspect the mother who goes to Spain over Christmas without her bolshie, prepubescent, monosyllabic, baggy-trousered son will have a better time as a result. But maybe the boy would, too.

Of course, giving independence to the pre-teens may sound sad, horrific even, like a return to Dickensian times. But if we accept they’re capable and socially active at 10 or 11, it might also get the government out of a hole. Because while the state may be unable to afford to pay pensions, parents could get support from their children by sending the ungrateful, mollycoddled spoilt little brats up some chimneys.