LAST WEEK, while sitting around a large pub table in a beer garden at 6.30pm, Mr Patterson and I were joined by some strangers – two thirtysomething couples and five children between the ages of three and seven. Each child, with a face painted like an animal and a balloon on a lengthy string, proceeded to jump on the seats and then onto the table, screeching at deafening volume and jostling with each other, while the parents produced colouring books and crayons that were unanimously ignored.


Suddenly, a gust got up and the balloons went berserk, battering us around the head, which was hilarious for the first three minutes of the next 20 balloon-battered minutes. Meanwhile, the parents guffawed "you'll be glad when we're gone," reassured the kids their facepaint was still "beautiful" (by now, they looked like goths), and failed to administer any discipline whatsoever.


And I realised, once again, we're living in a perilous new world that says kids, no matter what they do, are always lovely and are always to be encouraged – a new world order where the 'needs' of children rule above all else. So much so, in fact, it now has a name, newly coined in the US: The Kindergarchy.


This summer alone, a day out was cancelled because a six-year-old refused to wear any kind of coat in the drizzle. Another friend maintains she can "never" go out in the balmy evenings (and leave her husband with their three-year-old son) "because he (the son) goes mental and it's just too difficult."


Meanwhile, the kindergartens, nurseries and primary schools tell all our kids, every day, how wonderful, special, clever and good they are to the point of handing out certificates for "sitting nicely on the carpet" (a true fact). This every-child-wins-a-prize culture continues apace.


The English Football Association, meanwhile, has announced its plans to ban league table results for the under eights for fear of causing "too much pressure" should they lose a game. And last week came staggering news from Japan: of the primary-school production of Snow White that featured 25 Snow Whites, no dwarves and no Wicked Witch, after parents deemed the singling out of one child to be Snow White "discriminated" against the others. It would, presumably, irreversibly damage the self-esteem of the megalomaniacal tyrant they were evidently bringing up at home.


At school in the olden days, being a 'loser' was not only good for you, it was essential. Not being picked for games, for example, was less 'discrimination', more "Patterson, you are a pasty, weedy, permanently bronchial liability and we don't want your sort in the cross-country team." And thus, you developed, instead, the defence of a gallows humour, a belief in the individual and the everlasting knowledge that everyone being brilliant at everything is an outright lie and that it's okay to be rubbish at something. Or even several things, as home economics also proved.


Furthermore, you knew thereafter what adult life would entail: irredeemable unfairness on every level imaginable and a permanent wrestle with the forces of competition, humiliation and vengeance – forces that say sink or swim, adapt or die, and only the fittest will survive, be it in mind, body or spirit.


In these misguided days of the Kindergarchy, we 'aunties' and 'uncles' must urgently rise up and take far more seriously our responsibilities as increasingly isolated champions of truth in a world of parental illusion. And just the other week, a pretty good start was made.


After a four-year-old's birthday party, we were given a lift to the train station with birthday boy's five-year-old cousin, who was happily clutching a fabulous balloon-dog, newly made by the professional entertainer.


As Mr Patterson leapt out of the car, saying his goodbyes, he slammed the door shut and – bang! – burst the balloon dog in half. "The thing is, cousin Charlotte," I heard myself saying for the sake of our children's future, "life is just like that sometimes."


And the truth is, Mr Patterson looked more traumatised than she did. Kids are tougher than we think. They're surrounded after all, much of the time, not by neurotic adults cowed to their every whim, but by considerably more merciless other kids.


Claire Byrne is on leave