Children in Eastern Europe are said to be happier and healthier than their British counterparts. But what could we do to improve our children's lives?

It's been a bad week for children. A whole bunch of surveys and reports have proved that whether you're rich or poor, childhood is apparently the pits. Too many kids are growing up in disjointed families, fed erratically on junk food, are rarely spoken to, spend their lives in front of unsuitable television programmes and arrive at school unable to sit still, hold a conversation, hold a knife and fork or knowing how a book works.

On the other hand, there are nice, middle-class children whose parents fuss over them so much that they never even have time to pick the scabs on their knees - if they even do anything risky enough to cut their knees in the first place. These are the children who are constantly ferried from one activity to another, whose parents do their homework, their coursework and quite possibly their job applications too.

For all I know they probably go with them on their first day in work, as they did in nursery, to make sure they settle in.

A comparison between a group of children in Britain and some in Eastern Europe showed that the Eastern Europeans were both healthier and happier than their British counterparts.

It's looking grim. And there is certainly a lot we could be doing to improve our children's lives and futures.

But was there ever a golden age of childhood?

Back in the 1950s and 60s, when many of us were enjoying summers straight out of Enid Blyton or Just William, there were plenty of other children whose lives were wretched.

It was ever thus.

We worry that our children grow up too soon, but there are still plenty of people alive whose childhood ended even more abruptly when they had to start work at the age of 12, 13 or 14. Go back a generation more and the divide was even greater. The rich were spoilt and indulged, the poor were working.

Somehow, whatever their childhood experiences, throughout history, most children, most of the time have grown up into normal, healthy well-balanced, sensible sort of adults.

That might be because of their parents. But more likely, I fear, despite them.

When Heather Mills, pictured, went round to the home she once shared with husband Sir Paul McCartney it was to find he'd changed the locks.

Police were called.

He's apparently changed the locks on his other houses too. And frozen the bank account. Despite all of the best intentions, why is it that the words "amicable" and "divorce" never quite it into the same sentence?

So now we have Diet Coke and Coke Zero which is, er... a diet Coke with a different name. But for blokes. Bloke Coke.

Blokes won't ask for diet Coke, but apparently they'll ask for a diet Coke that's called something else. That's why it has an advertising campaign with all the sophisticated wit and humour of your average 14-year-old boy.

Still, it's got a nice butch black label. And that Zero is quite close to Zorro, so maybe the chaps will think of dramatic cloaks, masks and fancy sword play.

Except I don't think Zorro ever drank a sweet and sickly fizzy drink that made him burp. Or that he had to watch the calories.

OH, gosh, what an opportunity I missed! Many years ago, when I was young and keen and working as a secretary but was first allowed out on news stories, I had a news editor who didn't believe that women could be journalists. Or that graduates were any good. And that you could never be a decent reporter unless you'd spent the years from 15 to 21 reporting on funerals, flower shows and bonny baby competitions.

You can see how he was really going to love me, can't you?

So when I got things wrong - which of course I did, quite often - he would shout and yell and call me all the names under the sun.

And sometimes the old hacks in the newsroom would be kind and patient and helpful and other times they would wind me up and tease me mercilessly.

And I would go and have a snivel in the ladies and come back and get on with it. Because that's what I thought you did.

But I was wrong, wasn't I? What I should have done is gone home in tears and sued the lot of them. That way,I might have been awarded £800,000 and need never have worked again. Just like the lady from Deutsche Bank.

There are, of course, workplaces where bullying - real bullying - is rife and almost encouraged. But the bullying Helen Green endured - name calling and raspberry blowing - seemed, from the court case, more akin to the kindergarten than the world of high finance. And you would have thought that coping with that is part of being grown up.

But if Helen Green got £800,000 and I'm still working, I guess, it's easy to see who the clever one really is.

Forget double-barrelling, the new way for couples to keep both surnames is meshing. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes did it with their first names to become TomKat.

The mayor of Los Angeles's name Antonio Villaraigosa is actually half his, Villar, and half hers Raigosa.

Our family names, Griffiths and Amos, always required too much spit to be double-barrelled. But try meshing and we come up with... Gross.

Yes, well, maybe we'll continue to stick to our own for now.

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