I am so thrilled I don't have teenagers right now. Too hard for parents - probably the hardest it's ever been.

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Not that it felt at all easy in the years from 1998 to 2008. Those were our tough teen years. Of course, we had lots of ideas about how we wanted to parent but not much in the way of real guidance.

The then kid-rearing bible was Your Baby and Child by Penelope Leach. The big problem? It stopped at five. Plus, from what I remember, it had some strange advice including allowing kids to eat their ice cream before they ate their beans. Do I remember that incorrectly? Anyhow, my uptake of that advice stopped about two weeks in. The beans were uneaten.

The lucky thing for parents of teenagers right now is this - you can blame the government for the ban on social media. Your teenagers can direct all their pent up fury at people they've never met and will probably never meet. You can easily say, it's not my fault. Not my decision. Hands up! You'll have to write a letter to Albo and Rowlo and Wellso.

Me? Well, I only had myself and my lovely spouse to blame for our decision to ban television. Yep, ban television.

OK, not exactly. But we decided we would set strict limits on how many hours of television were watched, how many days a week it was watched - and, most controversially, what exactly was being watched and with whom. Remote control freaks.

On what basis were we making this decision? So much. Various commentators telling us how bad it was for kids to sit on their bums vegging out. By the early 2000s, medical journals were telling us that television viewing during childhood and adolescence was associated with long-lasting detrimental effects. Obesity. Raised cholesterol. Poor fitness. Weirdly, increased........

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