Overseas mail can take two weeks to get to your Mother in homeland and then another two weeks for a reply that may not get written right away. This means months for a simple conversation to take place. The telephone is useful, but it is often very pricey when compared to email and even a website. With a website you can put whole ‘albums’ of pictures on Internet that can be accessed any time, anywhere. This means Gramps can watch children grow week by week and have visual confirmation of all main events in their lives.

Email is like passing notes back and forth in class, except your classroom covers our whole world. Information, cool web sites, and other tidbits can be sent as attachments, making photocopying obsolete, which saves paper, money and time it used to take to copy text, which is now done with a button.

Ok so it’s coming up to Christmas and despite our every effort to darling teenagers in our lives, this time of year has turned into nothing more than a shop front.

I have to say, I was shopping other day with my 7-year-old and we saw a Bratz House. We looked at it and I was astonished at a price tag or £189. I could not believe it, for a plastic house! This was great as it allowed for us to have a conversation about money, however my heart went out as I know that many Parents will be pestered and pestered for that house and Parents all over country will give in to make their children happy. The power of advertising!

What has happened, we appear to have created a group of Parents who cannot say no. Parents seem unwilling to set limits or draw line anywhere. Is it that they feel more guilty as so many of them are working such long hours, is it that our kids have just got better at asking, or is it that advertising is just so good that we just cannot say no?

Whatever reason, I have to say that I am concerned that we are raising a generation who are ‘wanting machines’, who respond to marketing aimed right at them. They are growing up with a distorted sense of entitlement and we risk next generation becoming self-centred and self-absorbed and growing up into adults that simply do not care.

And figures are staggering.

According to market research, Families of 3-12 year olds now spend $53.8 Billion annually on entertainment, personal care items and reading material, $17.6 billion more that 1997.

And there is another worrying thought, does over-indulgence have a bad effect on school performance and relationships? Kids who get their own way most of time are very demanding and much less likely to be able to form long-lasting, sustainable relationships with people.

So what do we do?

1.Get clear what you want as a Parent

Most of us are so clear about trying to please our children and give them what they want that we forget about what we want. And I don’t mean material things, I mean what you want out of life – what do you want as a Parent, what is your purpose for being a Parent. Now it may be that your purpose is to give your children absolutely everything they want and if that is case, you are on course. If however, like me, your purpose is to raise a responsible and independant young adult who is caring and compassionate, what you are doing may be against where you really want to be.