by JO-ANN GOODWIN

Last updated at 09:47 14 June 2007

My husband and I started trying for a family eight years ago, when I was in my mid-30s. We left it fairly late, and four miscarriages down the line, there is only a fool's hope that we will ever become parents.

I know it may sound callous after the emotional trials we've faced, but I am beginning to see childlessness as a blessed relief.

In a UN survey of 23 countries, Britain was judged the worst place to be a child.

I am pretty sure it is one of the worst places in the world to be a parent.

Why? Because somehow our liberal society has created a tribe of monstrous kids. Parents have become terrified of their offspring, in thrall to their every want and desire, which they scurry to fulfil. And the thanks they receive? A constant litany of abuse, much of it woundingly personal, and publicly delivered, casual disobedience.

I know this from my personal experience of seeing friends abused. Meeting them with their children in tow has become an ordeal. I don't like hearing the people I love and admire described as 'pathetic' by their six-year-old offspring.

But this has occurred on more than one occasion.

So how did it come to this? Born in the mid-1960s, I respected and adored my parents: the idea of telling my dad to **** off, slapping my mum or calling her an "old hag" (another phrase I've heard uttered in anger) was unthinkable. But such behaviour is now par for the course.

Why have children changed so radically in two short generations? Partly, I suspect, because they have been encouraged to do so by well-meaning but misguided 'child professionals'.

Since the advent of the 1989 Children's Act, there has been an endless caravan of Bills and initiatives aimed at achieving a 'child-centred society'.

This has left many adults - particularly professionals such as teachers or police - feeling defenceless when they deal with 'challenging' (that is rude and violent) kids. The same legal system treats children as if they had a hotline to God.

Of course, there are always abuses in need of stamping out, and we certainly should do all we can to protect vulnerable children.

It should be recognised that the Children's Act did valuable work, in enshrining a child's right not to be physically abused, for example.

But we have lost sight of how things should be.

"Child-centred" has become a buzz phrase beloved by educationalists, psychologists and just about anyone working with children.

Our friends Jim and Charlie are child-centred parents. They came to dinner, bringing (uninvited and unwanted) their eight-year-old boy and four-year-old daughter. Plus the nanny. Because it took at least three adults to control these two brats.

The eight-year-old breezily announced: "Everyone loves me." Pointing suddenly at my husband, he demanded: "You love me, don't you?" When he got over the shock, my husband lukewarmly agreed.

What else to do? The entire evening was spent preventing the four-year-old climbing the stairs. Upstairs was my office, bedrooms - the usual private spaces of a house - and more importantly the cat, who had taken one look at the visitors and wisely fled.

The little girl's parents were laughably apologetic, proud of her 'intellectual curiosity' and 'adventurous spirit'.

Inevitably, at some point during dinner, she escaped.

She was upstairs tormenting the cat. She'd thrown the contents of the litter tray, water and food bowl round the bedroom.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. She burst into tears and left for home two hours later, still crying. Was it the first time she had ever been admonished?

For the past 30 years or so, everyone from lofty academics to Oprah Winfrey has taught us that we are not to blame for our sins and misfortunes.

We are the product of our upbringing and early influences - for good or ill.

But absolving the young of all blame for their actions - and failing to discipline them when they do wrong - has created a generation of brats.

Paralysed by guilt and fear, and spurred on by a gloopy sentimentalism which decrees that anyone under 12 years of age is, at core, an unsullied sweetheart, we give a latitude to children which they simply don't deserve. The results are not pretty.

I recently saw a small boy hit his mother full in the face with a cricket bat at a local fete. He'd been twirling the bat, ignoring her nervous pleas for him to stop.

Eventually, he deliberately flung the bat straight at her. As she sat, stunned, crying into the picnic, others ran to help. The small perpetrator just stood there, interested in the drama he'd produced.

Then there was the besuited dad out with his son. The boy was maybe six.

For some reason the child lost his temper, and the father tried to squat down and calm the boy.

He was struck in the face and quickly stood up, only to find himself repeatedly being kicked in the shins by this mini-tyro.

The astonishing thing was the man made no attempt to stop him, too scared to apply the kind of discipline that came naturally to previous generations.

Do not forget that the law now says that if you strike your own child and leave a mark, you can be arrested for assault. The power to discipline your own children is being eroded irrevocably.

These parents have turned into the family equivalent of a doormat girlfriend who snivels about how her man is misunderstood as she tries to hide the black eye.

No doubt our overwhelming love for our offspring is essential. And undoubtedly the struggle many now go through to have a child makes that child still more precious.

And children are precious, and I have a godchild and other children in my family whom I adore. But all this love should be tempered by strength and guidance, and the power to say 'No'.

In China, the single child per couple laws have created the phenomenon of the 'Little Emperors', the longed for baby (boy) who is the centre of the household - a generation of obese and horrendously spoilt young men.

Perhaps it is time we shouldered our responsibilities, learnt to say 'No' more often and began to behave as adults.

After all, these wayward children aren't the only ones who need to grow up.