A brilliant idea? Or the final nail in the coffin of family life? The Government has announced plans for primary schools to open from 8am until 6pm. In the next five years there should be at least one such "wraparound" school in each authority, until eventually every school would offer such hours. Many already do.

Breakfast, tea, supervised homework, fun and games. It could indeed be a boon and a blessing for working parents. Drop the kids off for their cornflakes, collect them when they've done their homework and are ready for supper and bed. Wouldn't we have all liked such a service for our children at some stage in their lives?

The long school day is, after all, one of the main reasons that some parents opt for private education, so it seems only fair that the peasants should get their chance too.

But there is something about the idea that is also deeply disturbing. When does help and support become a takeover by the state?

It is undermining family life. It's saying that it's fine for parents to work ten hour days and for children to hardly see them.

It says that parents are not the best people to bring up their children - or even to give them breakfast or decide how they play - and that the state can do it better.

It says that a parent's most important role is their job in the workplace and that children have to fit in round that.

And how long before this optional school day becomes compulsory?

We've seen this trend with nurseries. What started off as a good idea a morning or two a week for pre-schoolers, or to help working parents, is becoming universal - whether parents or children want it or not. Once most of the children in a street go to nursery, then the rest have to go too, because there's no one left to play with. Keep your children at home and you will be considered odd.

What starts as a good idea gets taken to extremes and has the opposite result of what was intended.

The family is the basic foundation of any decent society. Yet every new piece of legislation seems destined to undermine it, to shake parents' confidence in their abilities to raise their children themselves, to pull families apart rather than push them together.

Children need a small safe world in which to grow up. Instead, too soon and too often, we push them out into institutions, kidding ourselves it's for their benefit when really it's for ours. The time families spend together is shrinking and will shrink even more. Small is no longer beautiful. We will soon have the ten-hour primary school, we already have the 1,000-pupil comprehensive.

The number of 15-year-olds suffering anxiety and depression has increased by 70 per cent in the least 20 years, says a new study by the Institute of Psychiatry.

Should we really be surprised?

WELL done to the police for realising that the idiot in the Batman costume was a harmless protestor and not a terrorist. They took a split second decision not to shoot and they were right.

But terrorists aren't stupid and they also read the papers. The next Spiderman could be a suicide bomber.

And by the time police wonder whether to shoot him or not, we could all have been blown to smithereens...

A NUMBER of pub chains in Britain are considering a partial smoking ban on their premises.

Ireland's pubs have had a total ban since earlier this year. Inside the pubs it's great - especially if you're eating - with wonderful clean air. But it's not what you call relaxed, as there are always people bobbing up and down, pushing past, leaving their drinks and dashing for the door and a fag.

It also means that every pub doorstep is marked by a huddled crowd, a cloud of smoke and a carpet of soggy tab ends.

The air inside the pubs is clean and fresh, but out on the streets it's more like a kipper factory.

FORTY years after the affair between John Mortimer and Wendy Craig, we now know that they have a son, Ross Bentley.

He is described as their "love child."

Well yes.

But strange, isn't it, that the term "love child" is used only for the offspring of those parents who can't or won't commit to each other. So if that's a love child, then we need another word to describe the children born to parents who stay by each other through thick and thin to bring up together the child they've produced.

For if that's not love, then what is?

Published: ??/??/2004