Looking back to last summer's hue and cry at the injustice of inflicting children on their parents for several weeks in a row, I came across an article at 'spiked-online' by Frank Furedi. Professor Furedi sounds a welcome warning against government intervention in private family life, but nonetheless elaborates on his desire for government to back off by outlining a list of proposals that government could implement to improve parents' lives. Amongst the petitions for increased childcare facilities and for parents to be less involved in their children's education is the perennial plea, 'Give parents a break during the school holidays'. How? By government provision of summer camps and activity centres.

Professor Furedi is well known for his credible insistence that we are making childhood too 'safe', that we wrap our children up in cotton wool, inhibiting their play with our constant paranoia about every conceivable danger. Yet here he is demanding that children be handed from one government institution to the next, ostensibly giving them a 'stimulating and positive environment', but really so that their parents can go about their normal business without having to break step for their inconvenient children.

Yes, I know we all have a living to make and yes, I do know that family life can be an expensive business; my own four children are not overly impressed by any talk of downsizing or frugality, and why should they be? Yet, what sort of world are we living in where parents see their own children as inconvenient problems to be solved, preferably by the state? What sort of freethinking, creative people do we expect our children to grow into when we, their parents, feel peeved and let down at a six week gap in the provision of a continuous institutional environment for them? Seriously, these are your children. They are not the state's children.

The problem is rooted in an educational orthodoxy that has supplanted more and more of the roles of parenthood until parents are left floundering around the edges of their children's lives feeling at best marginal and at worst resentful of the very notion that ultimately it is they and not schools or play centres or the government who are responsible for their children. Frank Furedi gives the clue in another of his proposals for parents and children; 'allow teachers to teach and parents to parent'. This means that parents should be freed from the burdens of having to become amateur, quasi-colleagues. To do this we must increase the resources and facilities of schools, allowing parents to have less, not more, to do with their children's lives. Teachers should be able to expect parents to stick to the role of bringing their children to school 'nourished and fit'. What Furedi has forgotten in his contradictory utopian in which the state is expected to provide seamless childcare on the one hand whilst backing out of family life on the other hand, is that it is parents who have the primary responsibility for the children that they bring into the world.

Moreover, this is the case even when it comes to education. Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act states quite clearly that, "The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable; a) to his age, ability, and aptitude, and b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise." In other words it is up to parents to see to it that their children receive an education and whom they delegate that task to and even whether they delegate that task at all is up to them. Why? Simply because Furedi's first premise is absolutely right: the State should not be the 'parent in waiting' undermining parental responsibility and the law, thankfully, acknowledges this.

When parents take back the primary responsibility for education then questions about what to do with the children for the summer holidays are irrelevant. Of course, not all parents of school going children whine about the government lack of tax funded provision from the first day of the school holidays to the last; many parents find creative solutions to the issues of combining work and family life, but one group in particular do so all year round: home-educators. It is estimated that anything between 50,000 and 100,000 children are educated at home in the United Kingdom. These children come from every conceivable background and income level, but their parents have in common the commitment to take their responsibility for their own children very seriously.

What did I say to my Pizza Hut waitress? Well, for a split second I considered just smiling and nodding blandly, but I've never been good at taking the easy road. 'Actually, they don't go to school. We home educate them, so we're together all the time.' The waitress looked dazed at the prospect of full time children, then addressed them directly, 'you're very lucky. Your Mum must really like you to have you at home.'

In a world in which we've got so used to separating family life, working life and enjoyable life; a world in which we are accustomed to handing our children over to 'experts' at younger and younger ages so that we become no more than the providers of sustenance and a warm bed who co-operate with the teachers and educational psychologists who really know and raise our children, it is little wonder that anyone should be surprised to find parents and children who actually like one another and want to spend time together learning and living. Yet the liking isn't what comes first; what comes first is responsibility. Only when we face up to that responsibility do we discover that far from being a burdensome chore it is delightful to have children whose lives we are engaged in.

Children are not logistical problems to be solved; they are people who we freely chose to bring into our lives. I don't complain about handing over the money when I buy a new novel that I'm going to really enjoy. Why should I complain about handing over time, energy, creativity and commitment to the children who I deliberately gave birth to and am more responsible towards than anyone else on the planet?

What are you supposed to do with the children for the summer holidays? Live with them as people, not as problems.