If any of our sons installs a camera to spy on Mrs U’s childminding skills (as happened to a friend of ours), they’ll need to find a new babysitter!

HOW firm should we be with the children in our charge? It’s a question I’ve been pondering since a dear friend told me of a shock she received after she’d spent the day at her daughter’s flat, looking after her granddaughters while their parents were at work.

Instead of thanking her when she arrived home, her daughter rebuked her, saying: ‘You were a bit strict with them this afternoon!’

My friend was taken aback. It was true that she’d taken a firm line with the little girls when they’d acted up. She may even have raised her voice (though I hasten to say she adores them, and would rather die than harm a hair on their heads).

But how on earth did her daughter know what had gone on that afternoon?

It turned out that, unbeknownst to my friend, the flat was rigged up with hidden cameras, which allowed the girls’ parents to keep an eye on the children and their babysitter while they were out.

I was horrified when I heard. Leave aside the question of whether we grown-ups have a right to be strict with the young when they misbehave. I shall return to that in a moment.

Furious

If I’d been my friend, I would have been furious. Indeed, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d refused point blank to babysit ever again, after learning that the girls’ parents had been spying on her.

But like so many other grandparents these days — Mrs U included — she continues to give up much of her life to unpaid child- minding, with hardly a murmur of complaint. All I can say is that she’s a saint.

I thought of my old friend this week, when I read about a mother in China, who employs her webcam for quite a different purpose. Far from using it to make sure that nobody gets cross with her nine-yearold son, she live- streams him on the internet while he’s doing his homework, so as to discourage him from slacking.

As well as pushing her boy to stop fidgeting and concentrate on his studies, says Mrs Zhang of the south-western province of Sichuan, her system frees up her time to get on with the housework and look after her other child, who is three.

On one day alone, she says, more than 900 people watched him doing his homework on her Douyin account — or, rather, they watched just his hands as he worked, since children’s faces are not allowed on the platform.

I’m not sure that I approve of this approach either. I tend to agree with the comment on the story, which appeared in the South China Morning Post: ‘It is scary that the child is living under such a level of surveillance from such a young age.’

Certainly, I wouldn’t have wanted 900 strangers peering at our four sons, and spurring them on to work harder, as they did their homework when they were growing up.

But then I have to confess that I’ve always been the wimp in our marriage, far too indulgent of our sons and much too quick to overlook their vices — perhaps because I have so many of my own.

When it came to dragging the boys out of bed for school in the morning, pressing them to do their homework or enforcing bedtimes, it was always Mrs U who wielded the metaphorical whip. If it had been left to me, they would have stayed in bed for most of the day, never doing a stroke of schoolwork.

As it is, all four are now gainfully employed, with highly respectable degrees from Russell Group universities. Meanwhile, my wife has to make do with ticking me off for spoiling the dog.

To be fair to Mrs Zhang, it should also be said that the strict line she takes with her boy appears to yield impressive results. According to her own testimony, he has managed to finish a week’s work in a single session since she starting subjecting him to public supervision via her webcam.

Nor do we have to take her word for it that her strategy works. ‘I tried this too today,’ said one parent. ‘The homework that normally takes three hours, my child finished in 30 minutes, and I don’t need to supervise him any more in the holidays.’

Decadent

As for whether it would work in decadent Britain, well, that’s a different matter. I suspect that if parents live-streamed their children on the internet here, this would quickly attract all sorts of unsavoury characters, keener on grooming than encouraging hard work.

Either that, or the children’s schoolmates would tune in to jeer.

On one point, however, I reckon the disciplinarians have the right idea: the balance of power between adults and children in modern Britain has tipped much too far in favour of the latter.

This is particularly evident in our schools, where wet-minded politicians and the Education Blob have deprived harassed teachers of almost every effective sanction against disruptive pupils who hold all their classmates back.

I write with some feeling, since two of our sons are teachers, struggling to make a difference to children’s lives in inner-city state schools with more than their share of disruptive influences.

One of them tells me the ultimate punishment in his power is to telephone a troublemaker’s parents. But he’s terribly reluctant to do this, because he almost always gets one of two responses — both of which he hates.

Sometimes a parent will fly into a rage with the offending child, who comes to school the next day with a black eye. Either that, or mum and dad won’t give a damn how their little thug behaves at school, telling our poor son: ‘That’s your problem, isn’t it, mate? What’s it got to do with me?’

Meanwhile, children know they can make life utter hell for their teachers, by raising all sorts of allegations against them, from sexual impropriety to racism, transphobia or religious discrimination.

Incredible

Take the claim by a Muslim pupil that in banning ritual prayers, her school — dubbed the ‘strictest in Britain’ — is discriminating against her Islamic faith.

I won’t comment on the ins and outs of the case, except to point out that Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of the Michaela Community School in Brent, insists she introduced the ban for the good of everyone at the school.

A sudden craze for praying had become a source of divisiveness among her multicultural pupils and racial harassment of teachers, she said, while subjecting Muslim girls to undue peer-group pressure.

No, I just want to say I find it quite incredible that the pupil’s objection to her headteacher’s ruling has gone all the way to the High Court, while the school has had to engage a KC to argue its case.

In my day, the child would have been ordered to shut up and do as she was told, and that would have been the end of the matter. But pupils are the masters now — and don’t they know it!

Otherwise, I will say only that as an old softy myself, I feel a little squeamish about some of Ms Birbalsingh’s strict disciplinarian teaching methods, and the elaborate rules she imposes on pupils, such as maintaining total silence in the corridors.

But even her harshest critics must surely agree that she gets astonishingly good results. Her school was ranked top in the country last year for ‘Progress 8’, which measures how much pupils at secondary schools have improved since leaving their primary schools.

But let me end with a warning to my sons and daughters-in-law: if you feel tempted to install hidden cameras around your homes to check that Mrs U is not too strict with the grandchildren, you’d better find a new babysitter, double quick.