Along with developing pates and paunches, complaints about the young are perfectly normal symptoms of middle age in the male.

There has never been a time when men with a few decades under the belt did not despair about the inadequacies of the rising generation. Worse - piles, artificial hips, anecdotes - are sure to follow. We might bear this in mind, as we consider the recent warnings from Sir Digby Jones, the Director General of the Confederation of British Industry, about the way schools today are wrapping children in cotton wool.

However, it is clear that children today have a far easier time of it then when Sir Digby and I were young. For a start, no one today would gaze at a mewling, puking little baby and decide to call it Digby. It is a violation of a natural order of things to burden a blameless infant with a name encrusted with such inbuilt antiquity. Yet somehow or other, little Digby Jones with his runny nose and his short trousers managed to survive the horrors of the Burma railway that must have been his childhood: no wonder he looks on today's children as being pampered and cossetted.

Nonetheless, he has a point. Child-hood has become increasingly risk-free, even by standards less exacting than of those of someone who, when aged five, probably experienced a Santa collapsing in hysteria upon hearing that he was called Digby. Nor is the infantilisation of the entire experience of growing up a uniquely British phenomenon: right across Europe, the multiple fixations with "inclusion", with paedophilia, and with child-rights are robbing childhood of the uncertainties and the perils from which maturity and self-confidence result. In Britain, there is the further issue of litigation: a child merely has to fall in the playground, and the lawyers circling overhead are flapping downwards, confident in the carrion awaiting them in the farce that is now common law.

So that one way or another, the childhood of my childhood in the Leicestershire of the 1950s -- of playing all day unsupervised, of making my solitary way to school over several miles, and of getting onto the bus, alone, at the age of five to go to the hairdresser (to whom I would then solemnly give a tip of tuppence) -- could belong to the Stone Age for all the meaning it has to the children of today.

Liz Lightfoot's report in The Daily Telegraph last weekend about the children in Hampshire who can quote which articles of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child were being violated in the story of Cinderella read like an enjoyable satire, except it was not: it was a grisly and terrifying insight into the corruption of childhood by reason, law and rights.

Childhood should not be about logic and rationality, but of acquiring wisdom through experience to prepare for a horribly imperfect adult world in which reason, law and rights are often entirely absent. This is the very purpose of children's fairy tales. They are fables of injustice and random cruelty that tell us far more about the reality of life than any UN Convention.

One of Sir Digby's concerns is the removal of competition from schools, in exams and sports days. No one fails: all succeed. Now if Britain inhabited a planet called Hampshire, where children non-competitively studied the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, and could list the numerous violations in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, that would probably be fine. As it happens, however, Britain inhabits a planet called Earth, which it shares with -- among others -- 2.5 billion hungry Indians and Chinese, whose offspring probably made the Lego kit that the Hampshire children used to build their model of what they think a human right looks like.

At one level, the problems schools face today has been the victory of the ideology of rights over the traditional concepts of right-and-wrong; but another is the growth of parent-power. The school should be the empire of the teacher, whose rules govern all. Since the invention of formal education by the Ancient Greeks, a core principle is the absence of the mother. Once mothers are allowed to assert their authority in schools, as they increasingly have been in recent years, then maternal indulgence will inevitably prevail. The result is no longer an educational establishment, but the back seat of a family car on a very long journey.

The problem being faced by British state-run schools is part of a general, Europe-wide loss of vision about the future, not just for today's generation of children, but for the survival of democratic, tolerant society over the coming decades. That will require toughness, endurance, willpower and competitiveness, qualities that saved our civilisation 60 years ago, but which today are probably regarded as human rights violations in the schools of Hampshire. And history tells us that a society that elevates "rights" over the sterner values of life, is a society that will sooner or later simply have no rights worth defending.