Isn't Christmas tempting enough without encouraging debt-ridden students to spend themselves into trouble, asks Sharon Girffiths, mother of an undergraduate.

IS Barclays Bank really that desperate? Students already have a debt problem. The average student now leaves university owing £15,000. And Barclays is trying to make the debt even bigger.

As Christmas comes - and the first loan cheque is just about gone - Barclays, that big big bank, is encouraging students to borrow even more money. It might be legal. It might be good financial practice. But frankly it seems downright immoral.

An entire generation is being taught that debt is good and wheedled into borrowing more than they need. It's bad enough that they have to borrow money in the first place to get themselves an education. But do the banks then encourage them to scrimp and save, practise economy, live within their means?

Absolutely not.

Smaller Son is 18. He is a student. He has no income. He already has a £900 student loan debt. Barclays knows that because they run his student account. So what do they do? They write to him offering him as they so persuasively put it, "a little extra spending power".

"Make life a little easier for yourself" they say, offering a cheque to use on his Barclaycard account. "Treat yourself to a shopping spree or a much needed holiday"... "The ideas are endless and the choice is yours". "Simply treat yourself." But, they add, "make sure you use your cheque today". And to make sure that treat is pretty substantial, as an added incentive the cheque is pre-printed: "For amounts of £100 or more."

This is madness.

True, at 18, students are technically adults, but still financially inexperienced adults. And to tempt students into borrowing yet more money seems all wrong, especially for "shopping sprees and holidays".

To be fair, Barclays are not the only bank to do this sort of thing. Every day brings at least two offers of extra credit cards, cheap loans or cheques for the boys. In one week, they could have had about £20,000 between them. "Credit" according to the banks. "Debt" according to me. So I make no apologies for being a bossy interfering mother and binning the letters immediately and never letting the boys see them. Most other mothers I know do the same.

But if our prudent Chancellor can borrow £20bn, what hope for the rest of us?

The letter from Barclays warns my son not to exceed his credit limit. But when his brother went way over his overdraft limit, Barclays just extended it. Well, that was a real incentive to sensible spending.

It's all a bit different from my student days when I once went £3 overdrawn and my bank simply stopped my cheques. No discussion. No warning. No messing. Just "returned to drawer". The shame of it.

We never got into debt because we were never allowed to. Certainly nobody pushed credit cards at us, or wrote to us just before Christmas encouraging us to use them.

One day, maybe someone will sue Barclays or one of the other banks.

Well, smokers with lung cancer have sued tobacco companies for persuading them to smoke. Fat teenagers are suing MacDonalds for pressurising them into eating calorie-laden Big Macs. So why not sue banks for tempting us into debt?

Then they might think twice about pushing penniless youngsters into spending more than they can afford.