Sandra Ashenford reflects on the ups and downs of her week

DAUGHTER number four inadvertently sparked a fervent debate on Facebook last week when she asked if she could go into Gloucester with a couple of friends on Saturday afternoon.

I said I could give them a lift and do my own shopping, then meet them later.

But the mum of one of the friends felt that, at 11 years of age, they were too young to be out unaccompanied.

She asked via Facebook for the thoughts of other parents on the subject, and got them back in heaps.

Opinions ranged from considered points of view about letting the children have the amount of independence they felt comfortable with, to a flat out “my child is never going alone”.

Well, I know it can be a rough old world out there but I think it is better if children learn how to cope with it rather than being sheltered from reality altogether.

I’m not criticising other parents, because we all have to make those judgement calls as we see fit.

And because I have three grown-up daughters, maybe I’m more aware of real dangers versus media hype.

There’s also one other major difference between me and most of the mums of daughter number four’s friends, and that is I’m generally at least a decade older.

This means I grew up in that generation of children born in the 1960s, who spent our childhoods roaming the neighbourhood in mixed age groups of local kids.

We made dens in the playing field, played football in our road, and roller-skated down any sloping path we could find.

We would be out for hours at a time, without any contact with adults, and minor injuries and major disputes had to be resolved between ourselves.

To be honest, I was probably cold and bored quite a lot of the time (I hate playing football) and given the choice I would probably have stayed inside with a book, so I well understand the attraction of television and computer games.

But I did learn to be tolerant, resilient and resourceful, and I worked out who to avoid and how to stand up for myself.

Most of my generation entered the adult world of work at the age of 16 and were running our own homes in our early 20s, both of which we were able to do because we had been making decisions for ourselves from early on in our lives.