The Sun's video interview with the young parents

There is a moment in a video interview with Alfie Patten released yesterday when he is asked: “What will you do financially?” He looks up, cherubic face crumpled with bewilderment, and replies: “What's ‘financially'?”

This display of gauche immaturity is in some ways even sadder than the grim, factual detail that he was only 12 when he fathered this baby and that Chantelle was 14. Sitting on a hospital bed cradling his newborn daughter, Alfie, “proud new father”, looks like a baby himself.

The video shows Chantelle, who looks significantly older than Alfie (so much so that I mistook her for his mother when I first saw the pictures) laughing at his unworldliness as his expression flits between acute embarrassment and mild terror. So why on earth did their parents allow these vulnerable children and their baby to be paraded before the media? What did they think it would achieve?

It is easy to throw brickbats at parents at times like this. But if your little boy had just become a “child dad” and there had even been talk of a prosecution (it has since been decided there will not be one), wouldn't you err towards damage limitation? Wouldn't you protect the children's privacy as much as you could so that they could have something resembling a normal life?

Did anyone consider the rights of the newborn child before they starting posing for the cameras? Alfie and Chantelle may have been capable of conceiving a child; whether they were capable of making an informed decision about squandering their own and their daughter's anonymity is debatable.

Perhaps Chantelle and Alfie's parents, who have 15 children between them, think that turning the pair into celebrities, with the prospect of future magazine deals and TV appearances, is genuinely for the best.

It surely isn't. They are cast for life in a soap opera in which their every mistake will be charted. The massive media attention has almost certainly glamorised their predicament in the eyes of thousands of other kids who see babymaking as a passport to making front-page news.

But we should keep a sense of perspective, unlike the hysterical internet postings about this story that rage against “Broken Britain”. Teenage pregnancy isn't the end of the world; it isn't unheard of to father a child this young. Fifty years ago such pregnancies would simply have been hushed up and the baby adopted or passed off as another “sibling”, the grandmother assuming the role of mother for the sake of reputation.

There is none of that now - which is good. And there can be happy endings. Jamie Sutton, from Manchester, who fathered twins at 12 in 1999, certainly proved the doubters wrong. A decade on he and his girlfriend are still together; he has a job and has bought a three-bedroom house.

What he didn't get was a childhood. And Alfie Patten, who doesn't even know what “financially” means, has just waved goodbye to his.

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