Children

‘Feeling a bit stressed or anxious? Want to practise more mindfulness? Looking for good vibes and your best mellow and chill?’ This is not an advert for a life coach but the official sales pitch for NeeDohs, the much-coveted new children’s toys. These are not mere playthings, you see. Thanks to the ADHD-ification of childhood, they are ‘sensory fidgets’. NeeDohs are produced by American manufacturer Schylling. They are ‘the original sensory squish toy’, but others have appeared on the market, such as squishy ‘original viral dumplings’, produced by RMS International. Squishies are the latest craze – brightly coloured blobs of plastic to squash, squeeze, stretch and supposedly help children who have trouble focusing. Squishy, stretchy toys aren’t really new.

Every so often, a fashionable new concept is born. Witness the arrival of ‘matrescence’, which, for the uninitiated, is a phrase used to describe the physical, psychological, emotional and social transition a woman undergoes when becoming a mother. Or, as my mother and grandmother would have put it, and perhaps yours too: motherhood. ‘Matrescence’ first appeared in the 1970s, coined by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but it seems to be reaching maturity now. Adverts splashed across the back page of the New York Times make the case for the inclusion of the word in the dictionary. A ‘global movement’ is being launched (by a social networking site for women and a company that sells baby bottles) to put matrescence on the cultural map.

Keeping their promises Sir: Matt Ridley is right to assert the conservation role of gamekeepers (‘Ruffled feathers’, 30 May). They, like farmers and crofters, know wading birds are integral to Britain’s rich cultural landscapes. All ground-nesting birds benefit from culling generalist predators. I do this on my croft at my own expense because I love waders and passerines. Where costs cannot be borne by individual goodwill or taxpayer-funded grants, shooting provides a sound economic case for funding the vital combination of predator control and habitat management. A keeper’s livelihood depends on his ability to prove consistent competence in these two skills.

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. ‘Adults-only holiday,’ read the billboard. ‘Entirely child-free.’ But this wasn’t ‘adults only’ in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: At last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit!

My eight-year-old son’s eyes widened when I unwrapped a Christmas present I got from my parents: a bottle of cherry brandy from the Lyme Bay winery in Axminster. ‘Can I have some?’ Humphrey asked, for he had been hitting the cherry brandy hard over the summer. Not the alcoholic kind, of course, but the cherry brandy-flavoured lollies sold by the ice-cream van that parks outside his school on a hot afternoon. How could I refuse? Ashley Dalton would be scandalised. The junior health minister said this month that the government is looking into banning the sale of non-alcoholic versions of booze to teenagers in case it ‘normalises drinking’ and becomes a ‘gateway’ to the real thing. Children will be allowed to vote at 16 under this government, but not drink a Lucky Saint.

The forces arranged in favour of banning social media for under-16s are powerful and wide-ranging. The unlikely alliance includes the leader of the Tory party, more than 60 Labour MPs, Big Suze from Peep Show and the patron saint of all bad ideas – His Majesty King Charles III. It seems probable that when amendment 94A of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is voted on, it will receive support from all these quarters, as well as from Sir Keir Starmer, who has, true to form, launched a consultation on the issue. A handful of mental health charities will tell him that he must really get on with banning social media for teenagers, which he will then promptly and politely do.

There’s a myth that lots of us fall for/ ‘Kids’ books are so easy to write’/ And you can see why we might think so/ As so many of them are shite. Little poem by me there. As the dad of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, I have spent perhaps 100 hours reading some wonderful books, and hearing gorgeous books read to me. But parents everywhere will know what I mean when I say: Christ there’s a lot of dross out there. Why are so many children’s books so bad? Children learn through books. If they read lazy poetry, they’ll become lazy writers and lazy thinkers While looking for kids’ books to name and shame for this piece, I realised that some of the very worst offenders are now in a charity shop or the bin.

I still hang out with the same two lovable crackheads I sat beside on the first day of primary school. I keep all the stubs from every concert I’ve ever been to. I meet the same school dads in the same pub on the same night every single week and my point is that I’m a creature of habit. It takes a lot to change my mind, but enough is enough. I’m ending a lifetime of support for my beloved Labour party as 2025 draws to a disastrous close. This nightmarish, totalitarian rabble has done more damage to our country than Margaret Thatcher and the Luftwaffe put together.

As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into her uniform and then into the car. She has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the UK’s most underdiagnosed neuro-developmental condition, which leaves her with a brain wired for impulsivity, memory lapses and emotional storms that no local school can contain. Each day, I drive her across several counties to the only specialist placement that can meet her needs. Four hours a day, every week day. While I’m grinding through the traffic, taxpayers are footing bills that could fund whole classrooms. Councils and schools spent a record £2.26 billion on special educational needs and disabilities – ‘Send’ – transport last year.

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim; the potential for suffering too much to bear. What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once they’ve discarded half their chromosomes, the skin cells can then be fertilised with sperm, just as if they were human eggs.