Our neighbourhood is awash with children. Wide prams jostle on the pavements. Rival toyshops display their red windmills and ice-cream cone sand scoops competitively to attract the grabby fingers of the passing throngs. Local supermarkets stock the very latest baby food inventions, brightly packaged in orange, green, and pink, immediately edible and prominently placed. On each corner is a playground, filled with sand, slides and excited shrieks. On every other corner is a play-cafe, outside which, in bad weather, these prams with their serious suspension and rugged, muddied wheels line up like parked jeeps, the shrieks piercing hot stuffy air instead. They are lucky, our children, for this glorious world they inhabit. 

I suppose I should consider myself lucky too. Next door I can flick through rails and rails of beautiful children’s clothes. Downstairs and across the road, we can attend classes in early musical education, dance and movement, mother and child yoga, you name it, the list goes on. Nurseries, though somewhat short on places, are so plentiful you are bound to find one nearby, as we did. Should either child have the tiniest twinge of hunger as I pile milk, carrots and potatoes between the rugged, muddied wheels of our own enormous pram, a squeezy burst of organic pumpkin, pear and apple in a neat foil pouch will placate them until the shopping has been done. And what about all those mothers jostling on the pavement or protecting their coffees in cafes, just bursting to share their maternal anecdotes with me. “Stewed apple came right back out of his nose, you don’t say!”

To deny the pleasure and convenience this child-orientated environment brings would be untrue, and unfair to those whose livelihoods depend on creating it. We have a lovely time, mostly; never short of somewhere to go and always meeting our friends on the streets. So what’s the point of this description and the tinge of satire running throughout, you might ask.

You see, it came to me one grey afternoon in a cafe, too hot and hard at play, that there was something contradictory at work in this delightfully colourful place, however good its intentions. It was not so much the children – they were behaving in the expected way, dashing down slides, squabbling over toys and gorging themselves with soya hot chocolate and gluten-free banana cake – but the parents whose behaviour could perhaps be described as wanting. One father sat in the corner frowning at his laptop screen, a mother gabbled away to a client on her phone, whilst another flicked through a magazine. In their defence, they could have been simply enjoying the opportunity to park the children and get on with something else, which we all do, and need to do, from time to time. But why come here, I thought, to this place designed to celebrate the communion of adults and children, to read your emails?

I don’t suppose would mind so much if this plentitude of children’s play areas and apparently health-giving dried fruit bars was not accompanied with the parallel rise of child-friendly mobile phone applications and the near constant availability of children’s TV. With all of this, it seems there is something going on in these days of small and late families living in big, hostile cities, with busy parents who have constant access to the external world’s demands. We want our children to have fun and to be well fed. We also want to continue and succeed in our old highly pressured lives, whatever that conventional idea of success might be. Lacking the time to adequately fulfil both desires, we strike a compromise: a children’s world, pretty, diverse, distracting, pacifying, but most importantly a work of artifice.

This is not to say that children must always sit at the very centre of our entire attentions: most dissatisfying for adults and stifling for children – mine are not, and I don’t expect that of anyone else. But it is to say, my task as a parent is not simply to push my children into a separate, artificial world in which they are conveniently distracted, but rather to help them understand and take pleasure in the adult world, which they will have to fully inhabit one day. So now is the time for me to stop browsing the Mothercare website for adorable rainbow print t-shirts and to start pointing to the rainbows in the sky instead.