"IF you don't get out of my face by the time I count to five, I'm going to take all your toys and chuck them into an incinerator. And if you're still here five seconds after that, I'm going to chuck you in too."

I didn't say it out loud of course, but I wish I had.

Unfortunately, you're not allowed to say boo to a ghastly child anymore, never mind threaten to set them alight. Apparently modern children need to express themselves freely, while modern adults have to sit on their hands and smile benevolently.

The kid in question wasn't a complete horror, he was just persistent. He kept shoving my little girl, snatching toys and books from her and poking his finger in her face while shouting "Stay! Stay!". When she decided to leave the play area in the caf and return to my knee, he followed.

After a further five minutes or so of "Stay! Stay!", with his finger now firmly pointing in my direction, I was ready to park my boot up his bum and lob him back to his mother. But I restrained myself. I smiled. I ruffled his hair. And I didn't utter a single, solitary word that could even remotely be deemed a reprimand.

Unfortunately, neither did his mother. She shrugged. She smiled. She didn't do a blummin' thing.

But if I had told her kid to stop being naughty, I'm sure she would have been off her bum and in my face quicker than you can say "verbal abuse". I would have been scowled out, tutted at, I might even have been shouted at, and the kid would probably have been given an extra bag of sweets for his bravery in the face of such trauma.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that we should all busy-body our way through life shouting the odds at everyone else's children. But if their parents are not going to pull them up for bad behaviour, how on earth are they going to learn?

I once told off my niece for shouting at me (well, I had insisted she sit on a chair and not in middle of the dining room table, so I suppose I got what I deserved) and the temperature in the room noticeably cooled. She had been shouting, screaming and demanding the moon on a stick for 48 hours solid, but when I told her in a calm but firm voice that no one spoke to me like that in my house, it was I who suddenly feared I might be sent to my room without any supper (a supper which, I might add, I was expected to cook).

It was the same when a friend of my son's came to play and decided to stretch a spring from the bottom of the stairs to the top, getting the two-year-old to hold it at one end and then letting it twang back into her face at a velocity approaching warp factor six.

When I told her - again, quite calmly - that I thought this was a silly idea and that I would like her to stop, she went into a complete meltdown as if I had just beaten her black and blue with a wire coathanger.

I felt terrible, but had I really overstepped the mark? I don't think so. Kids need discipline. They need to know there is a line and they need to know when they have crossed it.

I don't think I have any right to shout, bawl or yell at a child, and I certainly don't think smacking is an option, but I do think that a brief but firm word of discipline should be allowed.

Any if my kids get in your face, feel free to reciprocate.

Updated: 10:44 Monday, March 20, 2006