I grew up with precious little choice about anything. You ate what you were given, went to school where you were told, wore your sister's hand-me-downs (sometimes, to be honest, ate some pretty second-hand stuff too). And twice a year - birthday, Christmas - you got a present.

We weren't poor at all but that was entirely normal and I don't remember feeling remotely deprived. Today, as we can see all around us, children seem to have everything - designer clothes, computer games, fussy eating habits and the attention span of itchy gnats. A report yesterday from the Children's Society found that one in ten kids now has mental illness diagnosed and it concluded that materialistic consumer pressure may be partly to blame, with children from poor backgrounds the main victims.

Where is it coming from, this consumer pressure? First, from television, and the false dreams on offer there (we didn't watch much telly either).

Children from poor backgrounds, as well as having less money to buy the latest clothes or electronic games, are more likely to have parents without time to spend with them, and homes without access to outside space, so are far more likely to end up spending hours in front of the telly soaking up adverts alongside the easy gratification offered by cartoon, fantasy or drama.

You cannot just blame the parents for this; many will be working hard, with no choice, just to put food on the table (some will be cleaning your house or looking after your children); after all, how many can afford a house with a garden in a city or suburb these days? On the Today programme yesterday, the chief executive of the Advertising Association, Baroness Buscombe, argued that advertising to children could be a social good, among other things contributing to healthier lifestyles. I profoundly disagree, I think it is overwhelmingly damaging. It exists to sell things - toys, dreams, promises. That's all.

Of course parents can correct bouts of consumerism in their children by teaching them what is and is not affordable, but why subject them to the clever traps of marketing people in the first place? Pressure is bad enough as it is, from schoolfriends and celebrity excess, without allowing some of the cleverest adult minds in the sharpest advertising agencies in the world to manipulate them as well.

“We want to turn this on its head in a sense and talk about how we can empower parents and children,” Lady Buscombe added. “I mean, have they asked parents, do they want children's programmes, because of course commercial broadcasters rely on advertising to fund children's programmes.” Well, do we want commercial children's television? Couldn't we live without it? Her comment betrayed an interesting assumption: that children have a right as consumers to as wide a choice of programmes as possible.

But why is it in a child's interests to be treated like a consumer? It has yet to be proven that giving even adults a wide range of choices improves their lives. In many instances, from too many yoghurts in the supermarket all the way up to a supposed choice of doctor or school, it is just confusing and stressful. I think the fewer, carefully selected, choices we can give young children, the more we help them. Watch the exhausted face of a six-year-old confronted by all this year's Christmas presents, without the time to play with any of them for more than a few minutes, and see what I mean.

But choice is the buzzword of the moment, and we are all supposed to be in favour of it, even when, as in choice of school for instance, it translates into that panicking six-year-old, now a worried 11, being made to pay for the gap between a political rhetoric of choice and the reality of a stressed-out parent obsessing over league tables.

What are we teaching here? What is everyone, from the politician who parrots choice in public services to parents squeezing their children through tortuous entrance criteria to Lady Buscombe, teaching those kids? That they have a right to a wide choice, in everything. It isn't true. There is no automatic right.

And so these disappointed little consumers, already angry and isolated, fed on a diet of socially alienating television and straitjacketed testing regimes, grow up to hang morosely around shopping centres (watching the adults consume). There, we as a society routinely allow, even actively encourage, their literal social expulsion.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, yesterday joined the campaign against the Mosquito, the high-pitched machine, unbearable to teenage ears, which sends them fleeing from shops and arcades. It is hard to conceive of a more antisocial way of dealing with groups of mooching adolescents with nowhere to hang out; it is astonishing that we accepted the introduction of this offensive machine into a supposedly civilised society without a murmur. In other spheres, wouldn't we call it torture, or at least some form of bodily harm? Having buzzed them off with Mosquitos, we have the pleasure of watching angry, isolated teenagers morph into depressed adults who demand Prozac from the doctor - because I've got a choice, haven't I? It's my right: I don't have to take some exercise if I don't fancy it. I choose the little pill.

The hundreds of millions of pounds spent by the NHS on prescriptions for antidepressants that may after all have been largely ineffectual is one of the prices of the consumer society, where I get what I want.

(Incidentally, did it strike anybody else that the idea of “publication bias”, where drug companies withhold inconvenient results about the efficacy of a drug they want the NHS to prescribe, is more commonly known as “lying” or even “fraud”?)

We are spoilt, and we are spoiling our children. They need to be taught to look down as well as up; to choose to feel fortunate, and not envious - and to recognise that gratification isn't as easy as buying a new toy or switching on a dream. And, as my mother would have been delighted to hear, it will not cost a thing.

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