Sharon Griffiths listens to a mother’s worries about the current generation of children

WHO needs a nanny when you’ve got a granny?

Maybe it’s time we started listening to her again.

Liz Fraser did. Liz is a mother of three children (none of them teenagers yet, she has that wonderful challenge to come...) and, despite having written the Yummy Mummy books about parenting, was worried about what we are doing to our children.

“The 21st Century is robbing our children of their childhood earlier and earlier and my book is a quest to find out why society is changing today and how we can make sense of it,” she says. “Plus, is there anything from bygone days we could learn from?”

So she asked her granny. Over a series of conversations, Liz discussed the problems of modern child rearing with her grandmother, Kathleen Fraser, 85, a former teacher and full of Scottish good sense.

And this is where the generation divide comes in. To anyone over 50 , Granny’s views are so sensible and logical, it seems amazing that anyone should think them worth writing down. Grown-ups were brought up by people like Granny. We know the drill. And our manners. And we eat up our greens. Surely everyone thinks like that, don’t they?

Well no. Somehow we didn’t get these standards through to the next generation, who are floundering a bit and who are so anxious to be their children’s friends rather than their parents, that these simple rules amount to something perilously close to child cruelty. Say no? Good heavens, what about the poor child’s self-esteem?

Then again, previous generations didn’t have rampant consumerism, the internet and 24-hour television to cope with.

Somehow, Liz Fraser – who has a Cambridge degree in Psychology and Neuroscience – steers a course that adapts the best of Granny’s wisdom to the tricky realities of 21st Century family life. And the result is much sharper than the rather twee title would suggest.

Among the subjects they discussed are:

■ Stuff. Today’s children just have too much stuff – too many clothes, too many toys. Buying more isn’t a way of being happy. Granny says: “The more you have, the more you want and the less satisfied you are.

Give them less and they’ll play with it more and use their imaginations to make up new games. That’s playing.”

■ Saying no and meaning it.

Simple. Granny’s a believer in smacking. Liz isn’t.

■ Children are not grown-ups and should have the security of being told what to do rather than asked.

Granny says: “Be their parent. Be in charge and give them everything they need to be children. It’s the foundation for everything that’s to come.”

■ Manners. Granny says teach by example. Say please and thank you to your children. Hold the door open for others, give up your seat for the elderly on the bus. If they get used to this, they’ll do the same one day. Encourage them to engage with other people in the community.

■ Spend time with your children.

Make time to eat together if only on a few days a week. And holidays should be family time. Granny says: “The times you truly get to know your children are when you are on holiday with them. If you can’t enjoy a holiday with your children, you have let something go terribly wrong – and you’ll never get it back.”

■ Computer games and everything else. Granny says: “What you have to do is try to relax about it, let them have a go at new things, but keep an eye on it so it doesn’t get out of control. It’s a juggling act and requires some compromise.”

A report for Unicef in 2007 found that British children suffer greater deprivation, worse relationships with their parents and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs and unsafe sex than those in any other wealthy country in the world.

One in ten young people suffers from significant mental health problems.

Some schools are considering having bouncers to keep order.

Clearly something has gone horribly wrong. Ironically, it’s at a time when we have more books, magazines, newspaper columns and television programmes devoted to parenting then ever before.

Last year when older people wrote in to this paper to complain about badly behaved children on trains and in town, some mothers of young children replied in such viciously rude and offensive terms, that I felt totally unable to use their emails and understood completely why their children were so obnoxious.

I should have set Liz Fraser’s granny on to them. That would have sorted them out.

■ A Spoonful of Sugar: Old Fashioned Wisdom For Modern Day Mothers by Liz Fraser (Harper Collins, £12.99).