REMEMBER THIS? 5.45pm Magic Roundabout 5.49 The Weatherman 5.50 The News 5.55 Regional news magazines 6.15 Tom and Jerry 6.25 Talkback with David Coleman 7.05 Z Cars 7.29 News Headlines 7.30 Harry Worth 8.00 Iron Horse 8.50 The News with Robert Dougall 9.05 A Series of Bird’s starring John Bird and John Fortune. 9.30 Sportsview with Frank Bough.

This was typical week-night television fare in the summer of 1967. Unless you ventured out to the cinema (where you may have treated the children to Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book, just out) this was it, in terms of screen experience.

Forty years on, Florence and Zebedee, Tom and Jerry have given way to the menacing hulks of Bullworth Academy in the video game Bully and the faceless strangers of internet chat rooms. By the time your 11-year-old goes to bed, she will have spent on average seven and a half hours in front of the screen (fifty-three hours a week), seamlessly switching from TV to DVD to online.

Our children’s unprecedented and ever-growing consumption of everything from animated cartoons to Grand Theft Auto has prompted two mothers to write The Media Diet for Kids, to be published next month. Teresa Orange and Louise O’Flynn are media-savvy — Orange worked in advertising and O’Flynn in PR — but above all optimistic about parents’ ability to control their children’s screen experience. Their diet includes basic, commonsense ingredients: setting a limit for telly consumption; banning televisions from the bedroom for children under 12; placing computers with internet access where adults can keep an eye on them.

The book examines the measures that are in place to help parents to shield children from stumbling upon inappropriate material — not only Ofcom, the body that regulates broadcasting, but also the watershed hour and contraptions that block what can be accessed on your TV set; but it emphasises that the most far-reaching or sophisticated of these cannot serve in loco parentis. The ultimate gatekeepers are Mum and Dad.

This seemingly obvious statement runs counter to the defeatism that characterises so much parenting today. Our children’s viewing habits have generated an incredible volume of research. There are studies — the latest, published last week, is an analysis of 20 years of research — showing that video games make children more aggressive; research that proves that video games help cancer patients to cope; studies that show a diet of violent TV prompts disruptive behaviour in the classroom; and research that proves that games are educational tools that teach your kids to juggle different tasks. What is missing from this body of academic research is a study to show why parents won’t interfere while their children sit at the gaming console for four hours straight, hooked on a session of Manhunt.

They moan, they wail, they write green-inked letters to Channel 4 or Ofcom and accuse video-game manufacturers of nothing short of murder — as Giselle Pakeerah recently did when she blamed Manhunt for inspiring her son’s schoolboy killer. Yet the assumption behind these parents’ hue and cry is that broadcasters, video-game manufacturers and site designers are not only sinister but unstoppable forces out to take over their little ones. This dangerous premise is as wrong as it is pervasive.

It is on show in other crucial areas of parenting: when Mum and Dad throw up their hands in defeat as their 12-year-old washes down his second packet of crisps with a can of Coke; when they shrug helplessly as their nine-year-old daughter skips out of home wearing a spandex tube top and hip-huggers that reveal her thong. Fatalism is not a great family policy, yet it has infected parents across the board — on the grimy sink estate as well as the gleaming McMansion in the stockbroker belt. Few adults today set down the law for their offspring, and fewer still are prepared to oppose these kids’ wishes. Mintel, the consumer research company, found that only 36 per cent of parents actively limit how much TV their children watch.

This parental defeatism stems in part from the guilt that contemporary mothers and fathers share about the amount of time they spend with their children. Most fathers in the 1950s and 1960s saw their children even less, but they didn’t feel defensive about it; there was no talk in those days about “quality time” and “bonding”; working mothers may justify their nine-to-five by pointing to the family ’s reliance on a second wage, but there are plenty of volunteers to condemn her flight from home and leave her feeling torn about where her real duty lies.

Equally, today’s parents are acutely aware — as are their children — of how the lifestyle they offer their offspring compares with that of their peers. As one child quoted in The Media Diet puts it: “I think TV makes you feel depressed. Like all you’re doing is watching people better than you, or worse than you.” Not to mention better-off or worse-off. Such odious comparisons prompt the guilty parent to compensate by relaxing or even suspending rules at home, as if one more hour of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas can make up for a divorce.

Yet children themselves want more, not less, parental involvement. Again and again, The Media Diet quotes pre-teenagers and teenagers who condemn their parents’ laissez-faire attitude, and call for a stricter and better enforced regimen. “I wouldn’t want my child just to play games all their lives,” says one 12-year-old whose parents set no limits to his video games. “They won’t get a good job. They won’t be able to concentrate.”

Quite. When these children grow up, you can bet they’ll be sitting round the living room with their own sprogs, watching a revived Magic Roundabout, until Zebedee says “time for bed”. At which point, the media-savvy parents will switch off the television and march the children to their computer-free, telly-free bedroom.

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