SHOPPING for a birthday present for one of my daughter’s friends, she suddenly homed in on the "perfect" gift – a stress ball.

"Don’t be ridiculous," I said, "She’s only 12, not a company executive."

She proceeded to tell me how her friend, in common with other schoolmates, was regularly "stressed out", and went around school saying so.

I raised my eyebrows, but perhaps I shouldn’t have. A report from Ofsted claims that almost half of ten to 15-year-olds are worried about the future, a 30 per cent rise from last year.

Apparently, with so many parents stressed out about job losses, homes and how they’ll pay for Christmas, not to mention climate change and international terrorism, anxieties are rubbing off on our offspring.

I wish I’d known this before – before I cruelly, albeit unintentionally, stoked the flames of my daughters’ angst.

"The credit crunch doesn’t affect us," they informed me, as they watched an item on children’s Newsround.

"Of course it does," I barked back, spouting forth about how we are really struggling, how food prices have gone through the roof, how our jobs hang on a thread, how the savage winter will mean bankrupting fuel bills, and how Christmas will be more about turkey twizzlers than a big fat juicy bird. In fact, I think now is a great time for us to go vegetarian, I told them.

They must have gone to bed reeling, with all that to contend with on top of the usual "so-and-so has a new best friend," kind of worries.

As if to reinforce the findings, my younger daughter’s primary school now holds pilates lessons, giving youngsters the chance to chill out during break time. How long before they squeeze in a spot of past life regression before maths, or Indian head massage for the pre-schoolers?

Thinking back to my own childhood, however, I don’t think much has changed. There was the ever-present threat of nuclear war, and I was all for digging a bunker in the garden, my father was out of work through strike action for a long time and money was scarce.

True, we didn’t have to sit in regimented rows and take exams while still breast-feeding, and we didn’t feel shunned by society if we didn’t have a Texas Instruments calculator – the early 1970s equivalent of a Wii-Fi-Nintendo DB6-iplayer.

But we still had worries. My greatest was how I would get the boy of my dreams, from the new estate, to marry me.

It’s not all doom and gloom in 2008.

The spectre of climate change, with all those images of polar bears clinging onto scraps of ice, brings a silver lining.

It’s an excuse to get the children to turn down the heating, use the same bathwater, and switch off lights.