Round at my PC-expert pal Ken's house recently, I was in a bit of a fix. "I'm not telling you anything about the PC ever again," he said flatly, "unless you start paying me." This, obviously, was not an option, so I waited until he went to make some tea, then set about rooting through his bookshelf for inspiration. Fortune smiled on me when I stumbled across a copy of last month's Reader's Digest, and, more particularly, on a feature with the title "Computer Games Can Help Kids." The article kicked off with a harrowing tale of electronics engineer Simin (sic) Foster and his two young children Parisa, eight, and Cyrus, seven.

They were playing an unnamed PC game in which the little kiddies "carried out executions or made sadistic warders whip prisoners at the touch of a button." Sounds fun. But Simin was worried. "They went through a sort of personality change after playing that game. They were very whiny and too hyperactive to settle down to anything that needed the slightest brain power," he fretted. Happily, though, everything turned out fine when the lucky juveniles had the nasty whip 'n' execute-em-up replaced with nice educational games like Fun School 4 and The Castle Of Dr Brain. "If you get the questions right you get a diamond," the piece reassuringly elaborates. Wow.

The article continues at some length is the same reactionary vein, but it set me thinking. In almost every area of culture these days, you find parents demanding that everything in the world be banned in case it turns their little darlings into sociopaths. Violent games, video nasties, additives in orange squash - you name it, it's responsible for the terrible state of the nation's youth. Anything, in fact, except parents who can't be bothered to exert some kind of controlling influence on how their children are brought up.

But then I thought maybe we should leave the development of the next generation in the hands of computer programs. Just think of the possibilities if we were to replace traditional parents with carefully-selected video games. Imagine, for example, if instead of a dad you had Leisure Suit Larry 5 - surely a successful adult life as the next Jim Davidson would follow? Budding town planners could be brought up by Sim City, thus ensuring blissful decades of inner-city contentment for the entire future population (who'd only be taxed for a couple of days in December). And who'd mess with anyone brought up on Oscar? Our troops would be so well camouflaged they'd be virtually invisible... Even pop concerts and football matches would be safer - you'd never have a dangerous crush again if everyone's mum was a copy of Tetris, teaching the noble art of spacial manipulation from an early age.