When I was a keen young reporter on a local newspaper, I was dispatched to the council house of a young woman who’d called and said her home had been overrun by cockroaches.

Home turned out to be the wrong word. It was a structure of sorts containing nothing but upturned boxes and several children who looked like they’d walked straight off the set of Kes. As we tried to sort out a family picture, it transpired that the woman had absolutely no idea which kids were hers and which ones belonged to what I’d taken until that point to be a puddle of lard but was in fact her sister.

Nor did she have the first clue what cockroaches were. “You know what they do?” she said. “They burrow into kiddies’ heads, lay their eggs and the kiddies end up with a head full of spiders.”

That was 30 years ago, and you might imagine things on the sink estates of grim northern towns were much better these days. But no. Over the Christmas holidays we read about the Mansfield couple who went on a seven-hour drinking binge with their sick-encrusted baby. The father was an extraordinary-looking creature who appeared to be part mouse, part pipe cleaner, and the mother had six previous drunk-and-disorderly convictions. Plainly, then, they are entirely unsuitable parents, and unless the social services continue to keep a close eye, their poor child will wake up one day in a box under a bed and it’ll be Shannon Matthews all over again.

I was therefore delighted to read last week that the government is going to take action to make life that little bit better for the children of this great nation.

However, it is not talking about increasing its vigilance on children who are made to eat only what they can find in the heroin-laced stairwells of the tower blocks in which they live, or those who are sent out to exchange stolen car radios for six-packs of Rohypnol.

Instead, it will be employing a vast army of men and women with clipboards who will come round to your house when your child is two to make sure it can speak properly. This is bound to be a worry if you are Glaswegian or the love child of Ant and Dec.

The initiative is being developed in response to a report that found some two-year-olds were unaware they had a name, let alone what it was. And that one in 10 of all children in deprived areas didn’t know a single nursery rhyme.

Hmmm. I’ve given this some thought, and I can’t see the problem. Nursery rhymes are cruel and terrible things full of stories about dismembered sheep and the bubonic plague. You have Simple Simon, who was obviously a retard, Hickory Dickory Dock, which is just rubbish, and Wee Willie Winkie, who ran through the town in his nightclothes, peering through the windows of children to see if they were in bed. Clearly, the man was a paedophile, and the less two-year-olds know about such things, the better.

In fact, I applaud any parent who hides these sordid and frightening stories and encourages their children to play Grand Theft Auto instead. But I very much doubt the parka army with its clipboards will share my views. Nor do I expect it will concentrate its efforts in areas where children are in real need of help.

In the same way that airport security people blunderbuss their antiterrorism efforts across the board, which means they are just as likely to jab a digit in the back of Harry Potter as they are a sweating Afghan with wires poking out of his shoes, social workers are just as likely to target the local vicarage as they are the sink estate.

Indeed, they’ve already said as much. Someone called Jean Gross, who is spearheading the government’s drive to make children learn nursery rhymes by the time the umbilical cord is cut, says that such problems also affect middle-class families, especially if their undertwos spend long periods in mediocre childcare while both parents work hard to pay off a big mortgage.

I find this a bit terrifying because I remember, when my children were young, having them examined by someone who didn’t know them, didn’t know us and could summon, with the stroke of a ballpoint, a government machine that could at worst take them away and at best give them a problem with a Latin name that they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to overcome. And all because they didn’t know Humpty Dumpty was not an egg, or a fatty, but a civil war cannon.

I actually know one couple who, quite wrongly, had their child taken away. And could have it back only if they lived in secure accommodation with 24-hour surveillance. It remains the most barbaric example of a useless and dangerous system that now is set to get even worse.

When it comes to the rearing of a child, there is no definitive right and wrong. Social workers – whom I admire for the most part – will continue to be too cautious in some cases and too heavy-handed in others. Mistakes will continue to be made, which is fine if you are a shelf-stacker or you pick vegetables for a living. But when your mistake devastates a family, it is absolutely not fine at all.

If we go back to the children I encountered 30 years ago in that cockroach-infested house, it’s entirely possible they are all now in jail for selling ketamine to toddlers. But it’s also possible (just) that they are university professors.

And let’s finish with the example of a young girl whose father was an abusive alcoholic and whose mother became so fed up that she shot him dead in front of the child. Every rulebook in the world would say she should be taken into care. She wasn’t. And she grew up to be Charlize Theron.

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