One of my friends is counting down the days until her little darlings are back at school.

“What with the royal wedding, the May bank holiday and Easter weekend, this break seems to be interminable,” she wailed down the phone.

Our brief conversation was snatched between a schedule of playdates, outings and leisure activities so mind-bogglingly complex that I imagine my friend needed an Excel spreadsheet to calculate what her offspring were meant be doing at any given moment.

Her children are both girls under seven who seem to have spent most of the last fortnight being ferried to birthday parties, junior discos, garden egg trails, bonnet-making sessions and early morning screenings of Tangled.

“That film was absolutely fantastic,” said my friend with some feeling. I realised her enthusiasm wasn’t based on Disney’s artistic achievement, however, when she added: “I actually managed to sleep through about 90 per cent of it, which was lovely.”

Allowing your child to be bored is tantamount to abuse these days.

Back in the dark ages, when faced by a pair of truculent children whinging about having ‘nothing to do’ my own mother would simply open the back door and push us into the back garden where we would be expected to entertain ourselves for several hours armed with nothing more than a couple of bamboo raspberry canes and a Space Hopper with a slow puncture.

These days she would probably be charged with neglect, but on the whole my brother and I seemed to have developed into fairly well-balanced, resourceful specimens.

In fact, apart from experiencing the occasional urge during visits to B&Q to brandish a bamboo cane at my husband while shouting, ‘The Force is strong in you, Skywalker’, I have managed to overcome the deprivations of my childhood remarkably well.

The odd thing about children these days, though, is that while their desperate parents seek to entertain and divert them up the age of about 12 in manner worthy of a French provincial aristocrat hosting Louis XIV, by the time those children hit their teenage years, those same parents seem quite happy (or possibly relieved) to release their offspring into the wild - often with unsettling and alarming results.

A couple of recent experiences have made me think that this is exactly the time when youngsters really need to be occupied around the clock.

Now, before I go any further, I feel I ought to say that I am very well aware that there are lots of perfectly pleasant, well-adjusted teenagers out there – I actually know some.

And to any parents reading this, of course, I don’t mean your studious, well-behaved teen. I definitely mean other people’s children, so please pack away the Basildon Bond and the green ink right away.

Good, that’s understood then?

I would now like to take the opportunity to write about other people’s children.

For starters I’d like to tell you about something I saw last week.

At about 4pm on Thursday afternoon a swarm of bored teenagers, about 30 girls and boys, were congregated at the entrance to a local shopping mall. Some were lounging against the wall transfixed by their mobile phones, others were just standing in the path as they jostled and chatted with each other, blithely - or perhaps provocatively and deliberately? - oblivious to the people trying to enter and exit the mall.

I kept my head down and managed to pick my way through this rather intimidating knot, but a woman behind me pushing a baby buggy wasn’t so lucky.

It didn’t help that she was talking to someone on her mobile as she tried to get through.

“Hang on; I’ll call you back in a moment. There are kids everywhere,” she muttered, trying to manoeuvre the buggy around an unyielding group of girls.

Talk about lighting the blue touch paper.

The girls went quiet for a moment and then as if possessed by one evil spirit they turned and stared basilisk-like at the unfortunate woman.

“There are kids everywhere,” said one of then in a sneering voice, parroting her words. The woman ignored them and pushed forward, but it was too late.

“Kids everywhere,” went up a kind of communal chant as the pack turned its attention on the woman and the buggy. Some followed her repeating the horrible phrase, others did their best to block her path.

The woman kept her head down and ran the gauntlet of their derision until the narrow entrance broadened out and she was able to escape into the crowd of shoppers.

It was a horrible and threatening thing to witness, made all the more disturbing by the fact that these ‘children’ were well-dressed, well-spoken 14 to 15-year-olds who clearly thought that they were the most important and fascinating creatures on planet earth.

How dare that ‘old’ woman with the annoying baby buggy expect them to move - and, what’s more, how dare she refer to them as ‘kids’?

I witnessed a similar incident on a train recently when a group of teenage boys, who were incapable of forming a sentence that didn’t include an obscenity, commented loudly on the merits or otherwise of the female passengers around them.

The fact that these youths were spotty inarticulate 16-year-olds made no difference to their awe-inspiring levels of self-esteem.

There is something pretty odd going on at the moment.

Out of the classroom, many parents treat their children like miniature Roman emperors and even at school it seems these same youngsters are seldom corrected or, God forbid, disciplined in case it scars their psyches or dents their confidence.

I suspect we are creating a real problem.

I watched most of Channel 4’s Jamie’s Dream School through my fingers. This was a well-intentioned project designed to introduce ‘underprivileged’ teenagers to the opportunities offered by education by using brilliant minds to inspire them.

I didn’t make it through to the last programme. If I heard anyone tell those worthless, arrogant, ignorant wastrels just one more time that they were ‘special‘, ‘bright’ or worst of all ‘gifted’, I thought I might just have an aneurysm.

Jamie’s Dream School was an extreme example, but it summed up a lot that is wrong about our attitude to young people at the moment. While it’s good to have the confidence to express yourself, it’s even better to shut up occasionally, show some respect and listen.

The most interesting comment of all during the Dream School series came from shrewd finance expert Alvin Hall, drafted in to teach maths.

Hall was firm, fair and, most importantly, not prepared to accept disruptive, insulting behaviour.

At the end of a session he looked straight into the camera and deadpanned: “I was told that many of these kids were bright. All I can say is that over in the States, we have a very different definition of the word ‘bright’”