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My son likes to play rugby for the local town on a Sunday morning. Obviously, I'm not allowed to video the games in case the tape falls into the hand of a paedophile, but then there'd be no point because it's not rugby as you'd recognise it.

The scrum, for instance, is just six boys leaning on one another. And any player doing something remotely dangerous has to do 20 press-ups.

Then they're clipped into their anti-submarine seats, in a four-wheel-drive tank and ferried home to spend the rest of the day trying to get round the parental controls on their dad's computer.

As a result of all this mollycoddling, our kids are growing up with no concept of danger. So, when my boy climbs into one of our off-road go-karts, he drives like the devil, refusing to slow for corners on the basis that someone in a hi-vis jacket will have smoothed out the surface before he gets there.

Inevitably, one day, he rolled it and this hurt. It wasn't the pain, however, that caused the tears. It was the amazement that an adult had allowed him into a situation where pain might be possible.

We saw the same sort of thing the other night while he was watching a programme about Ellen MacArthur's truly astonishing record-breaking trip around the world. "I want to break a world record", said the boy. "But I don't want to sail round the world. I want to see how many Smarties I can eat with chopsticks in under a minute".

What kind of an ambition is that?

Of course, I don't want him to be hurt and when he starts to drive, I don't want him to have an accident. So will I fit his car with computer software that allows me to kill the engine from the comfort of my own sofa?

Tricky one, isn't it? You buy your kid a car to give him some freedom, some sense that he's approaching adulthood, and because you can't be bothered to take him to parties any more. And then you explain that it's fitted with an RS-1000 Teen Driving device.