WOULD you let your toddler wee in the street? It’s a familiar parental dilemma – you’re out and about when your tiny offspring tells you they need to go, and they need to go NOW.

I bet most of us who’ve had children have whipped our kid round a street corner, and let them relieve themselves. I once saw a woman calmly holding up her little girl with her chubby little legs hooked over her mum’s forearms as she weed into a drain by the side of the road. And how many times have you hurtled past a parked car and seen a tot offering a sprinkle to the grass verge with their tinkle?

Likely as not, we thought nothing of it. We might have offered up a fleeting and wry ‘been there, supervised that’ sort of smile and carried merrily on our way. Kids, eh?

But a woman who let her two-year-old have a pee in one of the world’s biggest shopping districts in Hong Kong has caused a huge culture clash and divided China.

The family, from the Chinese mainland, were visiting Hong Kong on holiday and strolling through the shopping area minding their own business, when their daughter urgently indicated that she’d Got To Go. The queue for the public loo was too long, so the mum let her daughter do what she had to do in full view of passers-by.

The only trouble was that it’s illegal to urinate in Hong Kong’s streets. An outraged local filmed the mother and daughter and then posted the footage online where it went viral. The post, on a Chinese online forum, drew more than a million comments and re-posts in less than a week, and has widened an already deepening gulf between the mainland and Hong Kong.

Millions of Chinese tourists pour into Hong Kong every month, which hacks off local residents, who say the mainlanders are rude and bad mannered. In turn, the mainland Chinese reckon Hong Kong residents are patronising, snobbish and unwelcoming.

And to pay them back for being so ridiculously uptight about a kid needing a pee, Chinese families are now being urged to head over to Hong Kong for a mass outdoor wee-athon….

In addition, a survey undertaken on the mainland, showed that only 11 per cent of respondents thought it was wrong for children to relieve themselves in the street, which has added even more fuel to the flames. And however much you might metaphorically pee on them, the flames seem to be re-igniting with every blog post.

But it’s not just letting your kid do what comes naturally that gets people worked up. When my lad was a toddler we enjoyed a holiday on Florida’s west coast, heading to the beach each day to build sand castles and dig giant holes.

As we came off the beach at the end of each afternoon we’d strip sea-soggy bathing shorts off a very sandy three-year-old, wash him down and help him get dressed in dry clothes – just like millions of parents do who take their kids to the seaside.

Except that one time, there was a cop car in the parking lot. The officer got out, hand on the butt of the pistol in his holster, strolled over and stood looking at us for a few seconds. Then pointing a finger at my son he said to him sternly: “You put some pants on, boy!”

Turned out that in Florida, it’s illegal for even little kids to bare their bums while their mum quickly dries then down and gets them dressed again after a day on the beach.

Now I suppose you could argue that such legislation is necessary to protect youngsters from paedophiles who might see kids getting changed after a day on the beach as a target for their perversions.

But this particular law was apparently absolutely nothing at all to do with that, and much more to do with preventing Floridian old ladies having an attack of the vapours if they caught a glimpse of a child’s nether regions because clearly, the sight of a baby’s bare bottom in public is bound to cause offence.

Buttoned-up Florida laws aside I suppose there’s varying degrees of decency in letting your kid go to the toilet in the street. Behind a bush or tucked out of sight round the corner is all very well but those little boys who think nothing of relieving themselves where they stand because they’ve been allowed to do so, are the ones who will grow up into the sort of men who pee in shop doorways.

And we all know what we think of them….