I SUPPOSE WE SHOULD not be surprised that Strathclyde Police sprang to the defence of Miles Gandolfi in Glasgow when he was so brutally assaulted by Cherie Blair. We simply cannot tolerate these violent middle-aged women tapping the arms of 17-year-old fencing champions. The police were obviously right to take it seriously: it is not, after all, as if there were likely to be any other violent incidents in Glasgow on a Saturday. The only mystery is why Mrs Blair has not been suspended from all duties while a ten-month investigation goes on. That is what would have happened if she had been a teacher.

We shall come back to Mrs Blair’s lawless behaviour later. But the whole incident is beautifully in tune with the times. Fretting about children is all the rage. The famous letter against “toxic childhood” dominated last week’s news; now the Archbishop of Canterbury endorses a serious investigation. From every corner rush experts and counter-experts: commercialisation, divorce, technology, exams and nutrition take turns as chief enemy.

Meanwhile, a sneering posse of historical illiterates periodically announces that childhood is a “Victorian invention” and didn’t exist before 1860. Which is nonsense, as anyone who has ever read plays, novels, memoirs and poetry from the last 2,000 years knows. Try Shakespeare, or indeed the Roman playwright Terence, who in the severest of eras BC urged that “children should be led not by severity but by persuasion” . Teenage years have extended childhood, but it was always there. Shrugging it off only suits the interests that endorse neglect and exploitation of the young because it is less trouble than meeting their needs. On the other hand, a neurotically exaggerated regard for children’s rights has served another set of interests — not least lawyers — very well indeed.

Forgive me for sounding sour. Those of us who have been writing about childhood for 20 years feel a bit like the Prodigal Son’s elder brother. We spoke unfashionably against the bedroom TV, the trollopy primary school disco and the sedentary computer kid, and were decried as mumsy Middle Englanders. We spoke up for outdoor play and adventure trips, and were jeered at as overgrown Girl Guides. Now the prodigal society is coming home and we suddenly find ourselves out-pruded by fashionable angstmongers who suddenly agree with stuff that boring old Middle England believed for years.

Truth, and sense, lie somewhere in the middle. For instance, it is slightly silly to ban TV, but very silly not to ration it. It is loony to claim that mobile phones are evil, but equally mad to hand mobiles to four-year-olds or to allow them to be kept on in classrooms. (Are headteachers insane? Or scared of unclear laws?) It is not sensible to condemn the computer, but neither is it wise or kind to be so busy-busy that you leave children for hours with violent and sexually cynical material. It is economically impossible for most families to have a full-time parent; at the same time it is perfectly possible to eat often round a family table, with conversation. It is wrong to let eight-year-olds roam the streets at night, and equally wrong to ferry them everywhere in urban tanks, cramming their day with activities designed, in the repulsive buzz-phrase of educationists, to “add value”.

Every family has to find a way through the society it lives in. Every adult has to have a tender conscience and identify needs of children. Ministers would do well to stop interfering with reasonably functional families and concentrate on their real job: it is not, for instance, impressive to consider that more than half of the children in state care do not get one single GCSE, and are over-represented in prisons.

But let us return to Cherie Blair and her playful slap. The boy was teasing her: with photographers present, he succumbed to temptation and made a “rabbit ears” gesture behind her head. Now, rabbit ears are not terribly rude, unless you are in Sicily. They are merely playful. However, this was a distinguished visitor, and on the whole one would deter one’s teenagers from rabbitifying visitors for a laugh. Yet not a word has been spoken about the lad’s disrespect: he was questioned by the police not as a perpetrator but as a “victim”. The underlying implication, all too familiar to teachers and children, is that if you are under 18 you are safe, however rude you are, and if you are an adult you are under suspicion.

This does matter. The atmosphere created, accidentally, by child protection legislation has often eroded children’s security rather than improved it. It creates a sense that the child world — of its nature anarchic and impulsive — outranks the adult world of responsibility and constraint. Instead of the imposing policemen and revered teachers of the past (who had their faults, admittedly) we have built a sense that childhood is always innocent and adulthood threatening; even a lot of adults opt to be kidults. Yet any real child knows quite well that there is a dark side to its condition, and would like adults to represent safety and reason.

One more classic example of this danger was exposed in a teachers’ union survey about sexual insults heaped on staff by pupils. It is common for teachers to be called “slag”, “pouf”, “minger”, “lezzer”, and to face shouted sexual remarks. Often there are no reprisals, or mild ones. The irony in this misguided tolerance is that the poor deluded brats will soon be out in the UK workplace, an environment that is now so primly disapproving of “harassment” that if they address their workmates the way they do teachers and fellow-pupils, they will find themselves out on the kerb, sacked with no reference, before you can say “gross misconduct”.

It is a perfect image of the way we now operate towards children: a mixture of sentimentality, nervousness, exaggerated formal protectiveness and practical neglect of our main and obvious duty. Which is, quite simply, to help them to grow up.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone