"M-u-u-u-m," said an all-too-familiar voice from the living room, "what's contraception?" After dropping the kettle perilously close to a passing cat's head and almost choking to death on a particularly large Crunchy Nut Cornflake, I lurched out of the kitchen.

"Why do you want to know?" I screeched, panicking that the six-year-old had moved directly from kiss-catch to bonk-catch in less than a week.

"That man with the funny face just said it," the lad replied, while leisurely scratching his pyjama-clad bottom with one hand and shovelling porridge down his neck with the other.

The man with the funny face turned out to be Matthew Wright, presenter of The Wright Stuff on Channel Five, who was indeed talking about contraception. And, just for good measure, drug abuse.

Luckily the 22-month-old was too busy smearing Rice Crispies in her hair to notice (okay, they were Tesco's own brand Rice Pops, but I didn't want to look cheap in print). The six-year-old, on the other hand (a non-scratching, non-shovelling hand), was definitely intrigued.

"Is contraception something to do with astronauts? Or dinosaurs?" he asked hopefully. "Is it in my encyclopaedia? Can I have one for my birthday?"

Before stumbling blindly into the yawning chasm that is "the birds and the bees talk", I managed to flick channels.

Safe at last. Or so I thought until I realised we were watching Will & Grace.

"Are those men brothers?" the lad piped up again. "Are they best friends? Do you think that's why they're dancing?"

Click. ITV1. Aaargh - Trisha! A single millisecond of one of her "Don't have a paddy, I'm not your daddy" or "You think I'm your chum, but I've had your mum" shows has been scientifically proved to turn well behaved children into monosyllabic chavs, so I had no choice but to make the ultimate sacrifice.

CBeebies. It's boring, it's repetitive and it makes grown men and women want to ram their heads into a blender and press the button marked 'smoothie', but at least it's never going to give kids ideas beyond their years.

I know some of you will be thinking that I actually had another choice. I could have switched the television off...

Sorry, I passed out there for a moment at the thought of having to fill an entire school holiday with creative and mind-expanding activities like painting, baking and learning Japanese.

Listen, Yogi Bear wouldn't have invented telly if he didn't want it to be used for humane purposes, like Children in Need, Comic Relief, and giving bleary-eyed parents an occasional break from their mad, Playdoh-wielding offspring during the school holidays.

My point, in case you were wondering, is not that programmes such as Trisha, The Wright Stuff and Will & Grace shouldn't be on. Although I think I could make a strong argument in the case of Trisha. They shouldn't be on at nine in the morning during the holidays.

When I went into the kitchen to nuke my clap-cold coffee in the microwave, the kids were watching MechaNik on Channel Five's kids' strand Milkshake. Moments later as my coffee went ping, they were involved in a discussion about contraception with Janet Ellis (of Blue Peter and "I'm Sophie Ellis-Bextor's mum" fame) and Lowri Turner (of, erm, something to do with decorating fame).

I'm not suggesting the watershed should be hauled forward by 12 hours from 9pm to 9am. I suggest some sort of televisual buffer zone; a kind of grey area of programming between the early morning nonsense that kids love and the mid-morning nonsense that mums love.

Maybe then I won't have to lie to my children. Or at least it will give me more time to come up with a higher quality of lie - somehow I don't think the kids were convinced that the man with the funny face was really making balloon animals.

Updated: 09:32 Monday, February 14, 2005