OUR children know the number of ChildLine off by heart. There are posters advertising the children's helpline in the older boys' secondary school. It's even plastered over breakfast cereal boxes.

"If you're feeling upset, have a problem or need advice, call ChildLine on 0800 1111," it says on the back of the cornflakes packet. It's a number the boys love reciting to me when they feel particularly upset, for example when I refuse to give in to their demands for a PlayStation.

They have threatened to dial the number when I won't let them have friends to stay overnight, won't let them watch a video or force them go to bed when they're not tired.

I'm sure this is not what Esther Ranztsen had in mind when she set up this precious lifeline for children who really do need help, I tell them. They don't understand the suffering some unfortunate children really do experience. And for that I am glad.

Roscoe, our six-year-old, has been threatening to ring Esther for more than a year because we are so cruel we won't buy him a hamster, even though, apparently, everyone else in his class has one.

We offered to buy him a book about hamsters, a video featuring the mouse Stuart Little, even a toy hamster, but he wasn't interested. Recently, after a whole week of non-stop in-our-face pestering, he reached breaking point. With a bright red face and trembling cheeks, he bawled at the top of his voice, his arms outstretched: "ALL I'm asking for is a LITTLE CREATURE of my own. It's not much, IS IT?"

His father, by now at the end of his tether, made a good point when he asked why no-one had ever set up a ParentLine for harassed and downtrodden mums and dads. Still, Roscoe didn't break us.

But he couldn't believe his luck just a few days later when he landed the perfect opportunity to call Esther and report me over an incident which proved just what an appalling mother I am.

Sending my six-year-old to school on the last day of term sporting a big, black eye was bad enough. Even worse, I hadn't noticed. Worse still, it emerged that Roscoe was telling everyone, from the bus driver to teachers, classroom assistants and other parents that I had done it. "My mum threw sweets at me" he told anyone who would listen.

Which made me look particularly shifty when people asked me at the school gates, albeit good humouredly, what I had been doing to my son. "Black eye? What black eye? He said I did it? Oh..."

In my defence, our kitchen is dark, with small windows. And I'm so busy getting them all up, breakfasted and organised in the mornings that small details such as black eyes can be easily overlooked.

Like most children in large families, ours thrive on benign neglect. Unless there is blood spurting from a major artery, I tend not to make a fuss.

So when I accidentally skimmed the side of his face as I threw Roscoe's sweets for him to catch across the kitchen the night before, there were a few tears, a pat on the head and a: "There, there, never mind" before he ran out to play again.

And there, I rest my case. But the boys were having none of it. They were on the phone that night telling their grannies what their wicked mother had done. Esther would love to hear what I'd been up to, they teased.

It was partly to assuage my guilt that I found myself, next morning, in the pet shop reluctantly buying a lively little hamster called Max.

One of the reasons I had resisted for so long is that I already tend to a cat, six chickens and two goldfish, not to mention five boys. Adding a hamster to the list would surely be too much, I argued.

But the boys all insisted they would do the work. A hamster is no trouble, they assured me.

I am not convinced. Just minutes after we purchased him, Max almost caused a major incident as we sat down in a caf next door to the pet shop before heading home.

When I heard a rustling from the carrier bag at my side, I looked down to see Max's little rat-like head popping out of his cardboard box. Having eaten his way through, he was determined to escape. We managed to contain him, with difficulty, until we got him home to his cage.

"It'll be easy now, mum," said the boys. "We'll do everything."

But I am taking no chances. I have put a toy mobile phone in Max's cage, along with a little poster I have made, advertising HamsterLine.

"Are you feeling upset because you are not being played with or fed and watered regularly? Is your cage not being cleaned out regularly? Then call this number..."

Published: 04/08/2005