(bbc) A modern child's life is filled with unnecessary monitoring and mollycoddling from over-protective parents, says writer John O'Farrell, who sets out his opinion in the BBC Two series Backlash. Add your comments too. The physics of parenthood have exploded. Once the kids were satellites orbiting around the parents; now the centre of the universe is the child. Mothers feel guilty leaving their children to watch television on their own, so sit down and watch Pingu beside them, wasting valuable time that could be far better spent sitting in the kitchen smoking and doing Su Doku puzzles. Parents volunteer to go in and read in the classroom, when all they really want to do is spy on the teachers and be with their precious ones during school hours as well. When I was a child my parents did not surrender their dignity by wallowing around in ball pits. They went to the pub and left me and my brother on our own fighting in the car. Sitting in that pub car park taught me important lessons. I learnt what happens when you release the hand-brake on a hill. But of course I also used that time to read. I can still quote the AA Members handbook from 1968. Lost confidence Just as you see toddlers being restrained by those ludicrous safety reins, modern parents are wearing invisible reins that hold them back from doing what ought to come naturally. Manuals are consulted, diet fads are imposed, each scare story in the tabloids has parents changing the regime under which their kids are being brought up. Parents have lost the confidence to trust themselves or others. Fear has become the dominant emotion - both the fear of something happening and fear of nothing happening to them; the terror that their children might be ordinary. And so every second of the modern child's life is time-tabled and monitored. Children are strapped into the back of 4x4s and whisked from this tutor to that, and if there are a few minutes of mucking about in the park, the play is under the constant supervision of the Meercat Mums. So children are never bored, they never learn how to fill their own time, they never discover things for themselves. I am in favour of children being bored. In fact I think we need a Boredom Tsar (I suggest my old geography teacher).

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