We have difficulty in controlling kids because they see, on TV, so many situations where a child is not supervised. I'm stunned at how many children's programmes and U cert movies my daughter watches that contain scenes of children doing blatantly dangerous things without any supervision, parental or not (all three of the Spy Kids movies for instance... not only do they have no adult supervision, they team up with a man whose activities would profile him as a paedophile!).

I know that sounds far-fetched and it probably is, but there are so many programmes showing children acting alone. My daughter thinks it's OK to play on the street in these light evenings and gets very upset when I refuse to let her without supervision. Firstly, it's a pretty dangerous junction we live on and secondly, a boy was abducted from a nearby street last year. The two Soham children were taken by people they knew and presumbably trusted. Do you really think that a 'children playing' sign on the street or sticker on my house window is going to prevent someone from injuring or abducting her?


The whole idea of those signs was to alert other drivers to the fact that there is possibly a child in the car and the parent would be very grateful if you backed off about 30 feet or didn't come up quite so fast behind. It also alerted the emergency services to the fact that there might be a child on board if there were to be an accident. Personally, my experience tells me that no amount of signs or warnings on any vehicle with contents ranging from children to liquid oxygen to corrosive acids to farmyard produce, animal, vegetable or mineral will put off that proportion of drivers who think they are the only people on the road.   

In fact, despite the 'baby on board' sticker we had, I was pulled over one evening for DRIVING TOO CAREFULLY - I was doing 30mph in a 40mph area, at 11.15pm, when I knew there would be idiots on the road coming home from the pub.

Go figure!

LTS