OK, let's start with the toddlers... We want the best for our children. We want them to flourish and do well. We want them to go to good schools where they will be happy and well taught. In which case it's time we did our bit.

And we could start by teaching our children to behave.

A recent diary of a teacher working in a decent comprehensive in a decent area has been horrifying. Even in such a school, his job turns out be less about teaching than about basic crowd control. Many of the children sound absolute pains. If 30 minutes of every 45 minute lesson is spent just in getting books, pens and silence organised, then there's precious little left for learning.

Then David Hart had a good old moan at the weekend. He's the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers and you get the feeling that a whole career's worth of anger and frustration spilled out in his speech at the annual conference. He had a real go at parents, citing examples of parents who let children start school without any social or practical skills, who feed them junk food, let them watch TV until all hours, who condone truancy and criminal behaviour, and who have very little control over their children.

True, these parents are in a minority - but it's a growing minority, not restricted to any class or background.

And we can see it ourselves. Go into any shop, cafe or pub and you will find it hard to avoid badly behaved children. Tots who barely come up to your knees can cause havoc. They run up and down the bank, round pub tables, pick up and drop fruit in the supermarket. They whine, they sulk, they make an utter nuisance of themselves. And what do their parents do?

Not much. Except maybe force feed them a burger, some sweets or an ice cream. Anything to shut them up. Which is a great lesson.

If you cannot control a toddler, then you have precious little chance of ever taming a teenager. Once you've let a three-year-old run rings round you, you've lost your chance when he's 13.

Let a two-year-old triumph with a tantrum and all you've done is teach them that "No" means well, actually "Scream a little louder and you'll get what you want."

Of course, I've been known to bribe my boys into behaving - what mother hasn't? - but only very occasionally, honest. But parenthood is the most difficult job we'll ever do and it's time we got on and made a better fist of it. Though, goodness knows, no-one said it would be easy.

But if we do our job, then teachers can do theirs. Seems like a decent deal to me.

ONE in five people admits to having shoplifted at sometime. Back in my student days, there were some very accomplished shoplifters who claimed they stole entirely as a political protest. "All property is theft," they would say while "liberating" a book here, an apple from a barrow or an ashtray from a pub.

Funny though - once they'd grown up and got the mortgage and the Habitat sofa, the phrase "all property is theft" suddenly vanished from their vocabularies...

DEEPLY depressing watching the documentary about the sad state of our postal services. Coming from a proud post office family - the smell of mail sacks and lead seals can have a strangely Proustian effect - I found it a long way from what I knew and remember.

And, true, a letter once addressed quite correctly to me in North Yorkshire took weeks to arrive as it had gone via New York... But here, near Richmond, our postmen are lovely. And the few things that go missing are invariably to or from London.

But there still remains a mystery - if the Royal Mail loses 14.4 million letters a year, why does junk mail always somehow get through?

Published: ??/??/2004