I HAD just plonked my two-year-old down in front of a Winnie the Pooh video so I could snatch a few moments to read the newspapers when I came across an article that made me blush.

Toddlers and babies are being shunted off to nurseries or being plonked in front of videos so parents can get on with things, says the Archbishop of Canterbury. Our culture of work, he says, is causing abuse by neglect.

Of course, Dr Rowan Williams makes a good point. Most parents, struggling to juggle the increased pressures of modern life with raising a family, probably feel they don't do anything well enough.

We feel guilty when we're working and guilty when we're at home. The title of a new television series about the trials of family life - Blame The Parents - just about sums it up. Because everyone does. At times, it seems like all the ills of modern society are being laid at our door.

But was the golden age of parenting the Archbishop and others keep harking back to really all it was cracked up to be? Did mothers and fathers have more time to spend reading stories and playing with their children in the Fifties and Sixties?

One of my friend's mothers, now in her eighties, says she feels guilty because she was always too busy running the home to spend time playing with her when she was a child. And running a home then was hard work.

Without cars, convenience foods and labour-saving devices, women of my mother's generation routinely did everything from baking their own bread and making jam, to knitting their children's jumpers, scrubbing clothes on a washboard, wringing them through a mangle and cleaning rugs with a carpet beater.

Our holidays weren't spent being taken to museums or to the cinema. We just mucked about with friends, and spent a lot of time simply being bored. Which was no bad thing.

Surely Dr Williams, with two school-age children of his own, and a hectic life which last week included a trip to Rome for the Pope's funeral, then back to Britain to conduct the service of dedication at the Royal wedding, must appreciate this as much as anyone.

One thing that hasn't changed since the Fifties and Sixties is that most parents are simply doing the best they can.

A CAUTIONARY tale: When the children noticed lots of smoke billowing from our chimney, I didn't panic. So, the chimney's on fire? That's what it's there for, it's contained, it'll die down eventually, I thought.

I cleared the fire from the grate and, as an afterthought, phoned the fire station. "Dial 999 immediately," they advised.

Within minutes there was a fire engine at the door. The firemen headed straight for the attic and discovered it full of smoke. Just one spark could have set the roof alight. This was believed to be the cause of the blaze that gutted Allerton Park, the stately home near Knaresborough, recently.

The firemen were brilliant. "We take chimney fires very seriously," they told me. After putting the fire out, they even came back later to make sure everything had cooled down. Since then, friends have confessed that, like me, they thought a chimney fire wasn't all that serious. And just think how much more serious ours would have been if the smoke had appeared after we'd gone to bed.