IN THE MID-1930s, my father travelled from his home in northeast Essex to the house of his uncle in Hampshire. Not such an uncommon journey, except that my father was 11 at the time and he went by bike.

It is hard to imagine blithely dispatching a pre-teen on such a ride these days. “See you in a fortnight, son. And mind how you cross the M25 intersection at Dartford.” But is that pragmatism in action? Or is it depressing evidence of the “health and safety mentality”?

I only ask because, as Father’s Day nears, The Dangerous Book for Boys (a manual, designed to revive tree-climbing and conkers), tops the bestseller list and its authors, Conn and Hal Iggulden, are laying down the dad-challenging argument that our own age, prone to prissy agonising, has removed from boyhood the fun of danger.

They could have a point. We are, possibly, keener than any previous generation that our children shouldn’t put their eyes out with sharp sticks. We have lined our public playgrounds with the spongier kinds of Tarmac, as token of our pioneering regard for small necks. Thousands of cosseted boys now grow up without ever knowing the sensation of accidentally snapping shut a penknife on the meat of their thumb.

So The Dangerous Book for Boys is keen that parents recapture for their children the thrill of peril. But recapture it from where? Not from our own childhoods, necessarily. When I came home from school, I mostly ate a plate of jam sandwiches and watched Scooby-Doo. The diaries of my youth testify hollowly to years of strictly non-hazardous under-stimulation — whole weeks contained in the solitary entry “Mucked about”.

A 21st-century middle-class boy would not recognise this tundra as a life. He is, by contrast (and the authors of The Dangerous Book don’t make enough of this), dizzyingly busy. Even before you factor in the statutory hours of Gameboy play and television, there are Saturday football clubs, Thursday kick-boxing classes, Wednesday band practices — a complex network of commitments co-ordinated by overcompensating parents, who remember subconsciously, perhaps, how bored they were at this time in their own lives.

Then there’s the social life — the parties, the sleepovers. The fridge door buckles under the accumulated weight of the related admin. Eighty-five per cent of modern parenting is taxi driving. The other 15 per cent is diary management. Have you tried to schedule a meeting with one of your children recently? The chances are they’ve got nothing available this side of July.

Is someone seriously suggesting that boys and their fathers find windows in this bursting schedule to build go-karts? For whose benefit? On the computer game Need for Speed, a seven-year-old will have selected his car, stripped and rebuilt its transmission, upgraded its exhaust system and destroyed a rolling police roadblock in the time it would take a revivalist go-kart builder to source his orange box.

Of course, The Dangerous Book for Boys has no place for electronic entertainment. I mention, then, another book, Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You — itself a reassuring and timely gift for Father’s Day. Johnson’s careful and uplifting argument is that the increased complexity of popular culture can induce in our children spectacularly advanced levels of mental agility, patience and even sociability.

Johnson would, I’m sure, be disquieted by the thought of today’s wised-up, computer-literate kids dumbing down into a nation of catapult-wielding, water-bomb-dropping tree-climbers. But that’s assuming they have time to do so, and I don’t think they do.

• I BEGAN writing this article at 9.23am, the minute of the day at which we are most energised, according to a new study. The compilers of the study don’t explore the science behind this surprisingly precise conclusion, but presumably 9.23 is the moment when the sugar rush generated by one’s bowl of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Clusters reaches its maximum potency.

  Unfortunately, as I home in on the finish line, the clock ticks on towards 2.16pm — the accepted low point for energy and enthusiasm, according to the study. Don’t blame me, then, if I can’t think of a decent ending. I’m just a victim of uncontrollable forces affecting us all.

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