I've often thought that the true way these days to tell if someone is middle class is if their children can conceive of no greater treat than a trip to McDonald's. If your dread as you walk through the doors, to be greeted by the smell of frying and floor disinfectant, is in inverse ratio to your child's joy; if the harshly lit interior (even the new, retro Sixties one complete with twirly chairs) and the giant plasma screen induces an immediate headache; and if, despite telling yourself not to be so silly, you find yourself furtively glancing around hoping no one you know has seen you, then your middle classness is indisputable. It is more definitively proved even than by, say, your limestone floor, your White Company sheets or your Lakeland online account.

You would have thought, given that I tick yes to all of the above, that I would welcome the news that Liverpool council is proposing to ban Happy Meals. The council's Childhood Obesity scrutiny group argues that by giving away a free toy, McDonald's is trying to boost sales, and that a meal of cheeseburger, fries and chocolate milkshake contains 740 calories, almost half the recommended child's allowance of 1,600.

Well, knock me down with a Big Mac. They give away free toys to try to boost sales, do they? And a milkshake as well as a burger and chips increases calorie intake? It's a national disgrace. Why stop at banning Happy Meals? Let's go the whole hog and banish McDonald's altogether. While we're at it, let's ban alcohol and close all the pubs - binge drinking's a massive problem not just among the young but the middle classes too, you know. In fact only this weekend I read that the subgroup most at risk from liver disease from excess drinking is middle-aged women. Well, if you've spent your 30s and 40s preventing your children going to McDonald's - and, as like as not, also banning them from watching television, eating white bread, sweets and biscuits - I'm not surprised. The stress of all that would drive anyone to drink.

But back to Happy Meals. I think that when your life feels out of control - which, if you're a mother who works, it is, almost by definition - the temptation to go round banning everything in sight is great. You feel permanent guilt at not being a good enough mother: but if you can boast that your children ingest no sugar and have never set foot inside a McDonald's, you can at least congratulate yourself on something.

Similarly, you can take a stand against consumerism. You can ban them from watching TV or playing on a computer and you can limit their toys. You may not be able to send them out to play for hours on end, but you can fill their TV-less hours with classes in everything from Mandarin to Kumon maths. And will you then be able to tell yourself you are a better parent? Clearly that's what the adults who took part in a Children's Society survey think. The majority feel increased commercialisation is damaging children's wellbeing and that they are increasingly preoccupied with possessions, especially fashionable clothes and electronic equipment.

Well I don't think anyone can argue that children are not increasingly preoccupied with clothes, mobile phones and laptops - but then, so are we. There is an expectation on all of us to look fashionable that did not exist 20 years ago, and in the past few years more and more adults have seen the need to buy a laptop or home computer. They're expensive but, just as happened with televisions, cars and mobile phones, you begin to feel that to be without one is to be unacceptably excluded.

Can we really be surprised then that children want these same things too? For anyone over 11, a mobile phone is not a luxury but an imperative, a crucial means of communication, mainly by text because it's cheaper. Their need for a laptop is almost as urgent: yes they use it for schoolwork, but mostly they use it to instant message their friends or talk to them on Skype. Is that really so different from the hours we ourselves spent on the phone when we were teenagers, endlessly talking to our best friends even though we'd just spent the whole day at school with them? The report published by the Children's Society in September 2006, collated from the responses of 8,000 children, shows that what matters to children most is: 1. a stable family; 2. friends; 3. leisure - having things to do that are cheap and accessible. After that comes school, smoking and drugs, places to go, unhelpful adults, money, attitude to life, and health.

It is children who have their priorities right, but doing something about it is difficult. How much easier it is, for example, to ban Happy Meals than to focus on making sure your relationship is stable so that your children feel secure, or find ways of improving leisure facilities for teenagers. Children are usually quite good at sorting out for themselves what matters and what doesn't. They might complain, but they nevertheless usually understand when something can't be afforded, or is deemed unsuitable. It does no one any harm to be denied from time to time; what is pernicious is denial all the time. It is the most impoverished who most crave possessions, which is not surprising - but it is their poverty we should be seeking to address, not the advertising of those things they yearn to possess.

Meanwhile, two questions. Is the occasional Happy Meal of chicken nuggets, fries and a Coke (510 calories, £1.99), any worse than that middle-class staple, a Pizza Express Margherita (403 calories, £5.50)?

And who is doing more for young people: McDonald's, with its cheap food and recently announced “McA-levels” - management qualifications equivalent to A levels for youngsters who train there - or some councillors in Liverpool who think that by removing the toy from a Happy Meal they will have struck a blow against childhood obesity?

A word from the wise

One line from my colleague Carol Midgley's remarkable interview yesterday with the two girls who were abducted on their way to school by a paedophile who held them for four days and raped them keeps playing over and over in my mind.

It is the comment made by Lisa, explaining why, nine years on, they are not traumatised, that “you can either think everything's ruined, or go the other way and put it behind you”. Interestingly, there is a considerable body of research that shows that people are generally more resilient than they think, a point worth remembering as the debate about Prozac rages.

The point about Prozac, it seems to me, is that it does help people who are severely depressed. For the rest of us, Lisa's advice takes some beating.

The greatest gift of all

It's Mother's Day on Sunday, and those of us lucky enough to have children can expect to be given cards and flowers. But with Madeleine McCann and the schoolgirl Shannon Matthews still missing, Milly Dowler's stricken parents making a heartrending appeal for information about their daughter's murder, and the reminders again of the brutal killing of young women by Steve Wright and Levi Bellfield, I rather think it should be the other way round.

When times are hard what sustains parents is not only the protective love of our partners, but the innocent, boundless, unconditional love of our children. There is no greater gift, and I for one am profoundly grateful.

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