Anybody who was watching the last semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent — that’s about 10m of us — will remember the moment when the waif-like 10-year-old Hollie Steel forgot the words to Edelweiss and started to sob uncontrollably. Strictly speaking, she should have been disqualified for not finishing the song, but thanks to the tears, some impassioned appeals from Hollie’s mum, who had conveniently found a microphone, and some frantic negotiations with the 10 o’clock news, Simon Cowell announced that Hollie would be given another chance.

She went on to give a performance that was described by Piers Morgan, a judge on the show, as “one of the gutsiest things I’ve ever seen in my life”. She won a place in the final, in which she came sixth.

I work in television but, as a viewer with a daughter of Hollie’s age, I was moved by the tears and felt distinctly queasy about such children being prime-time entertainment. I felt the same way during the final when Cowell made a little boy cry because his performance was not as polished as it had been the previous night.

The government clearly shares my qualms, as it announced last week that it was drafting new legislation to govern the use of children on TV. The law at the moment is largely concerned with the hours they can work, the effect on their schooling and the backgrounds of the production staff who deal with them (CRB-checked, every one; and no staffer is ever meant to be alone with a child).

The BBC is scrupulous about not identifying children by their surname or school or even home town in case they are targeted by paedophiles — a policy that caused debate within the corporation when the 14-year-old diver Tom Daley became our youngest competitor at the Beijing Olympics. Ed Pol — the editorial policy team — wanted to refer to him only as Tom and to keep his home town a mystery, but in the end it conceded that Daley was in the public eye and could be identified without putting him at risk.

But is protecting children from molestation really the most present danger? What about the effects on a child’s wellbeing of simply appearing on national TV? I have been called a child abuser and a modern-day Mengele for making a show about childcare regimes that included controlled crying. I thought it was a legitimate line of inquiry but viewers disagreed. If I and the producers of Boys and Girls Alone, Wife Swap, Supernanny and all the other shows that put children in situations and then film them are guilty of anything, it is placing children in the public eye without really thinking through the consequences.

These shows are made because audiences love seeing children on TV. They are, in this world of media training and Max Clifford, the only real deals left. No wonder there are plans for a child-only Junior Apprentice. By now, we all know that the adult contestants don’t want to work for Lord Sugar but just want to stay in the competition long enough to secure their show/column/line of lingerie. Kids, however, might actually want to win. Children can’t hide their emotions and that makes them TV gold.

The problem is that what is cute when you are six can come back to haunt you for the rest of your life. I appeared in a documentary about my school when I was 17; 10 years later I was still being accosted by strangers saying, “Aren’t you the girl that sat on her housemaster’s desk?” That documentary was shown once. Imagine what happens now in the world of YouTube. It can be only a matter of time before little Kylie’s tantrums in the House of Tiny Tearaways mean she fails the background check for the Foreign Office. Victimisation of children who have made ill-advised television appearances is rife — like the posh girl Alice in Channel 4’s Rich Kid, Poor Kid, who faced general opprobrium for her unpalatable anti-chav views.

I don’t see how legislation short of banning all children from appearing on reality TV can protect them from this kind of reputational damage. That’s not going to happen, but, like doctors, producers need to approach with the commandment “First, do no harm” firmly in their minds.

You might think that the best people to decide whether their children should be exposed to the glare of television were the parents. In theory, yes, but take the case of the top-rated American show Jon & Kate Plus Eight — an observational documentary following the life of Jon and Kate Gosselin (who are paid $75,000 — £45,000 — an episode) and their eight-year-old twins and five-year-old sextuplets. This show’s highest-rated episode is the one in which Jon and Kate agree to separate after the discovery of infidelities on both sides. The money may pay for the kids’ education but can it be in the children’s interest to have this traumatic event and their reactions to it on national television? Who is at fault here, the producers or the parents?

In the end, in the best tradition of talent shows, the issue of what is acceptable may be for the public to decide. Of the 331 complaints to Ofcom after Hollie’s appearance on BGT, only 50 were about the purported “cruelty”; the rest were moans that Hollie’s tears had earned her a second chance, a breach of competition rules. Hollie has spent the past month performing in the Britain’s Got Talent national tour. She hasn’t broken down once. So is Hollie an innocent victim of ratings-hungry TV producers, or a Violet Elizabeth Bott (I’ll thcream and thcream till I’m thick) with a vocal mum? The public evidently thinks the one lesson children shouldn’t be learning from TV is that if you cry you get your own way. It doesn’t happen at sports day; why should it happen on the box?

+ I would definitely recommend buying shares in Dr Tattoff, the Californian tattoo-removal chain. Readers with teenagers will know that getting a tattoo has become every much an adolescent rite of passage as passing out on Bacardi Breezers. Tattoos can be sensitive: one 17-year-old I know has the word “blossoms” inked on her wrist as a reminder to carpe diem. Or saucy: another girl had an arrow tattooed on her stomach. Or simply excruciating: the girl with a Greek key design that goes all the way round her waist.

The modern teen doesn’t even have to brave the tattoo parlour — you can get it done in Selfridges. But despite all their talk about it being “so cool to have something that’s, like, for ever”, I am 99% sure that Dr Tattoff will be doing good business. What looks great on a taut teenage midriff doesn’t go with stretchmarks, and the carpe diem tattoo that seems winsome at 18 is just irritating at 35.

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