MAYBE we should have let them roam the streets, fall out of trees, jump in rivers. We are raising the most pampered, protected and cotton-wooled generation ever known. From the moment they're strapped into their baby seats until they're delivered daily at the school gates, our only concern is to keep them safe and protect them from traffic, paedophiles, stress, germs, and any sort of risk to their health and welfare.

Then what do they do?

They dash abroad as soon as they can, drink themselves senseless, take all sorts of drugs and have sex with strangers in public.

Is this why we sterilised their every toy, ferried them everywhere and hardly let them out of our sight?

Youngsters need risk. They need the excitement and they need to learn how to cope, how to weigh up risk, how to avoid it and how to minimise it. By protecting them too much, we deprive them of the chance to learn, so they use up a whole lifetime's worth of danger in ten days on a foreign island. We protect them from the risks of everyday life so they create their own risks.

Binge drinking is fun and dangerous - which is precisely why they do it. If they don't ruin their livers or get into fights, they wander into the paths of cars as they stagger home. The incidence of young women pedestrians killed while drunk has soared.

Coincidentally, reader Peter Murphy from Evenwood sent me a copy of one of those bits of web wisdom that float round the Internet.

"According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50s and 60s probably shouldn't have survived," it starts and includes such gems as, "Our baby cots were covered with lead-based paint, which we licked off; we had no child-proof lids on medicine bottles; when we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets; we spent hours building go-karts and when we sped down the hill, we realised we'd forgotten the brakes.

"We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and there were no lawsuits - they were accidents and we learnt not to do the same thing again; we had fights and learned to get over it; our actions were our own, consequences were expected; we had freedom, failure, success and responsibility and we learned how to deal with it all."

Of course, we want our children to be safe and we're not going to send them out to play in the traffic. But maybe if we didn't protect them from quite so much risk, quite so often for quite so long, they might not have to go out and create something far worse for themselves. And maybe in the long run they'd be safer and happier.

OH dear, poor Jon Drummond. The Olympic gold medal winner triggered a false start at the World Athletics Championships in Paris and was disqualified. In tears, and with a pet lip that my mum would have warned him not to trip over, he refused to go and instead staged a lie-down protest on the track, like a stroppy little two-year-old.

Oh gosh, and haven't you so often wished to do the same? In the supermarkets when they close the checkout, at the bank when the hole in the wall rejects your card, when you get a parking ticket, when someone queue jumps, when the barman serves everyone else before you...

Yes, I think Drummond might have sparked off a new trend in protest - heel drumming and fist banging optional. It might not get you anywhere, but it won't half make you feel better.

SO now men are to get counselling for postnatal depression. PND is a very real illness, largely caused by the terrific physical and hormonal changes a woman's body goes through during pregnancy and birth.

A man has nothing comparable to go through. What he has to cope with is being pushed into second place in his partner's life and having to accept responsibility for someone small and helpless.

It's called growing up. Deal with it.

PS On the end of 192 and directory inquiries:

If you have Internet access, save yourself the hassle and expense of battling with those new numbers. Go instead to www.bt.com/directory-enquiries, where you can get ten free searches a day. And keep your sanity.

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