"IF it was down to me, I'd put them in a cage in the garden and poke them with sticks," said my wife.

She wasn't talking about England supporters who are on the verge of misbehaving in Portugal, it was her solution for dealing with small children who make life a misery for their parents.

A new series ironically entitled Little Angels (BBC1, Tuesday) once more focused on us poor parents who are making such a mess of bringing up babies.

Jo and Jason Barton's three small sons, Luke, Harry and Elliot, constantly fought, threw tantrums and disobeyed their mother and father.

Both worked full-time and were finding the limited hours they spent with the boys during evenings and weekend was like being BBC executives telling Ross Kemp and Steve McFadden they must rejoin EastEnders for longer hours and less money.

Inevitably, there was an expert on hand, psychologist Dr Tanya Byron, who looks like she eats kiddies for breakfast.

The cool, calm psychologist talked Jo and Jason through parenting techniques so that the boys were soon clinging to the sides of a pushchair for fear of upsetting their mother.

And it wasn't a good old-fashioned slap around the legs on offer, here we had rewards earned by "smiley face" good behaviour stickers.

"This is just blackmail and bribery," announced the woman who is the people's answer to Dr T and brought up three fairly, well-behaved youngsters with the "come outside with me for a moment" method. However, there was one occasion when we hid around the corner in a supermarket as our eldest, then aged two, rolled around on the floor in a screaming strop.

We peeked from a safe distance as a shop assistant walked up and asked nicely "Is everything all right?" to be told "No, go away" as our fully paid-up member of the terrible twos club dusted herself off and continued shopping.

What would life be indeed without someone else's child to complain about?

Those with a little parental emotion left were attracted to Born Too Soon (C4, Wednesday) where premature babies weighing just a few pounds were shown fighting for life.

While you marvelled at such small scraps of life surviving in incubators, the mighty holes in our National Health Service were again exposed.

Triplets Louis, Ruth and Gregory, born to two nurses at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, had to be split up because there were insufficient intensive care beds and there was an admission that around 500 desperately-ill babies are turned away each year by this specialist nursing unit.

Another mother, Sarah Sidwell, was told to go home - a journey of two-and-a-half hours or more - because her baby required months of care and Southmead Hospital, Bristol, required her room back.

A change of heart by Bristol staff and desperate phone calls for help brought baby Isaac closer to home in Leominster, which is where he should have been in the first place.

Basically, you can run a car-making plant on the "just-in-time" delivery service system, but the same rules can't apply when it comes to saving lives.

Or have I misunderstood what Accident and Emergency is all about?

Published: 12/06/2004