GCSEs or EBaccs? I fail the parental fretting test But then I remember my own childhood in the Seventies and Eighties. I gave up ballet at the age of seven because it interfered with my after-school ritual of tea and toast. I failed my Grade 5 piano exam in an appalling meltdown at the Belfast School of Music. I resented any extra impositions on my free time, but my school was a good state grammar, and there was enough in the atmosphere to foster academic success. Many parents cannot rely on a similar standard of state education now, which may demand more input from the family - but the most extreme, nervous "overparenting" often seems to occur among those who have installed their children at the top schools anyway. And even at my six-year-old son's state primary, the teacher gently reminded parents not to do their children's model-making projects for them. But why would we? If the child makes a shambolic model, they will be embarrassed by it next to those constructed by their peers, and try harder next time. Too much adult involvement simply skews the learning experience. Yet, at the other end of the spectrum, we hear of parents who have taken the principle of laissez-faire to a startlingly bad place - who cannot be bothered even to feed their children a proper breakfast, toilet train them in time for starting school, or read them a book. British parents are becoming ever more polarised. If your attitude to your children is exceptionally neglectful, you can certainly help create a disaster. But I'm not convinced that hurtling to the opposite extreme is a recipe for success. Lost in the undergrowth of another life Forest Boy" is missing again. If you remember, he was the young vagabond who turned up in Berlin claiming to be a 17 year-old called Ray who had lived rough in the forest for five years with a father who had recently died. Last June he was revealed to be Robin van Helsum, a troubled 20-year-old Dutch youth. Now the German authorities are suing him for the £16,000 care bill, if they can find him. I have a sneaking sympathy with Van Helsum, whose forest seemed to be of the psychological variety, a thicket of difficult relationships from which he attempted to emerge afresh. The "Reggie Perrin" stunt is less worthy of sympathy when done for financial gain, as in the case of John Darwin, who pretended to die in a canoeing accident and popped up again in Panama while his wife collected the life insurance. Sometimes it is deeply disturbing, as with Frédéric Bourdin - the subject of a recent documentary film, The Imposter - a Frenchman who falsely claimed to be the missing son of a Texas family and was, incredibly, accepted into their home. Such stories fascinate us because it is always alluring to imagine what it would be like to slough off one identity and inhabit another. Yet most of us are prevented from doing so in the knowledge that - although it might sometimes feel as if abandoning one's original self like a piece of lost property would make everything simpler - what followed would get more complicated by the day. A red menace lurks in Hampstead Every so often, the flora and fauna of this land are menaced by an alien invasion. There is the hideously robust grey squirrel, which has long since driven our trembling red Nutkin into protected reservations. There is Japanese knotweed, the ferociously energetic plant that annexes gardens and can shatter tarmac. And then there is the new, toxic harlequin ladybird from eastern Asia, which is gobbling up our harmless, useful native variety. One of the most terrifying arrivals, it emerged last week, is the red swamp crayfish, which has come over from the US to take up residence in the bathing ponds on Hampstead Heath, and is bullying swimmers by nipping them in vulnerable spots. It has been said that these crayfish are aggressive in defence of their territory, and they appear to think of the sleepy Hampstead waters as their manor, a delusion that makes me think we should go in hard, net them, and flog them off for sandwich fillings. One by one, these pugilistic arrivals are shredding our long-established pleasures and creatures. Coming soon: a mite that spoils real ale, and a giant mosquito that only attacks Morris dancers.