The amoebic splitting of government ministries sometimes looks like mere panic — as with the unfit Home Office or the death-dealing Defra. In the case of the old Department for Education and Skills, however, there is hope in what has happened. One half of it, “Innovation, Universities and Skills”, sucks in bits of the old Trade and Industry department, and focuses on the 18-year-olds' move towards the working world. The other bit is Ed Balls's Department for “Children, Schools and Families”, which now includes children's social services.

I like that, because implicit in its title is the acceptance that childhood and schooldays are more than a feeder factory for the economy; that decent homes and happiness are as important as school grades. The risk, of course, is that Mr Balls will start interfering in private family life and annoy the hell out of us; yet there are rays of hope. It cannot be bad that today he launches an investigation into the possibility that advertising and commercial pressure harm children, increasing anxiety, bullying, eating disorders and drinking.

Go, Balls, go! Keep it in mind that children are not adults. They may have broadband and edgy clothes but don't be fooled: they know less than us, have experienced less, believe more readily, feel more deeply and are infinitely more receptive to learning — including those lessons devised by advertisers. The average ten-year-old sees some 20,000 adverts a year, recognises 400 brands by name, and is the target of intensely clever marketing psychologists. Mr Balls is cautious about “jumping to conclusions” before doing research, but it doesn't hurt for the rest of us to make a little hop or two — perhaps from the spike of drink ads on television between 4 and 7pm to the plethora of staggering, miserable kids on Friday night. Nor does it take a university department to confirm children's increasing obsession with labels and brands. Hard to forget the 11-year-old interviewed in an investigation who not only said that a child with non-label clothes would be a “Nicky-no-names”, but that she could not be friends with such a loser.

Children in Britain are ceaselessly, efficiently educated in one area alone: the study of how to be cool through spending. Clever ads, irresponsibly modish editorial content and greedy celebrity endorsement tell them that happiness depends on looking right, wearing the right things, liking the right heroes, playing with the newest toys. This begins in early childhood, with a startling degree of parental insouciance. One survey found that more than a third of children under 4 — and half of under-16s — have TV in their bedroom. That was six years ago. Overmuch television has been linked by reputable researchers not only to unfitness but to short sight, poor attention span, premature sexualisation, violence, copycat bullying, celebrity worship, unreal expectations and inability to communicate. And that's before you even get to the ad break.

So yes, government concern is not nanny-statism. There are things Mr Balls can press for that will level the playing field in the perennial contest between human kindliness and relentless consumerism. Advertising to children can be curbed (in Sweden nobody may market to the under-12s), and age regulations on drink sales, magazine content and violent and sexual computer games can be properly enforced. Which, at present, they are not.

But most of all, government must recognize that its love affair with “wealth creation”, coupled with a failure to control house prices or build sufficient public housing, has damaged human relationships and made children suffer. One strong reason why British children — more than other Europeans — are left at the mercy of the media is that they spend too little time talking, eating, playing and reading with adults who love them, whether or not they've got cool kit and wicked mobiles.

Children need parents who genuinely — though without spying and restricting — want to know where they go, what they're drinking and with whom. They need adults to listen to their fears and feelings, and enlighten them — with suitable levity — on the rapacious absurdities of commerce. The ridiculous concept of “quality time” does not fulfil this remit: children's confidences come out gradually, while a parent is cooking supper or walking to the shops with them. When both parents (or the only available one) work and commute long hours to meet mad mortgages, and are battered in their turn by media shrieks that they deserve “me time”, family structures crumble. Children crumble fastest.

Under this Government, 58 per cent of mothers with children under two work, as do 62 per cent of those with children under six. A vast majority say it is from pure economic necessity. Which means that the jobs are unrewarding, low paid and too far from home. Yet that is not all. To our general disgrace, it is not only the obviously struggling families who leave their children prey to commercial sharkery and vapidly malign influences. The upper-middles, ambitious and mercenary have their own abusive cycles of rushing, spending, ignoring the domestic hearth and replacing intimacy with iPods. Every Christmas we get jolly articles by well-paid journalists saying how their children “have to have” things because “they've seen them on telly, what can you do?”. Get a grip, mate, that's what. Spend the time, not the money. Make pancakes for breakfast, give them a hug, read a bedtime story, go swimming, polish up the family jokes.

OK, Ed Balls can't legislate for those things, but he could push for economic and housing policies that would make it easier for families to relax. He could also consider what policies would make it more likely that relaxed, unstressed teachers could help to replace those parents who will always be selfish and negligent. Gosh, it occurs to me that Mr Balls is minister for happiness: as the children might say, how awesome is that?

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