The toddler in front of me was rocking back and forth in his seat, screaming periodically. ‘Come on now, Justin, what did we say about sitting quietly?’ his mother cajoled. ‘You’ll spoil it for everyone else.’

But Justin wasn’t even pretending to listen. He stood up on his seat and proceeded to clamber over the other theatre-goers.

His mother apologised profusely and tried to follow him along the row, pleading with him to return to his seat. He didn’t. His reign of terror continued for most of the performance.

This week, I took my nephew to see a play, aimed at two to five-year-olds. He sat through it without a murmur, but others were atrociously behaved: hitting, shouting, throwing things. At times I wondered if I was at the theatre or the zoo.

So many of the children lacked any real discipline. Their parents tried reasoning with them — but, being toddlers, reason doesn’t always work.

I wondered what my own mum would have done if I’d been behaving like that as a child. I knew the answer. One warning, then, if I did it again, trousers down, a slap on the back of the legs. Simple. I know it’s a cliche when people say they were smacked and they turned out OK — but I was smacked, and I did turn out OK.

Yet in recent years there have been very vocal campaigns to criminalise any physical chastisement of children. Just this week, the day after I’d been to the theatre, research was published suggesting smacking toddlers risked turning them into aggressive teenagers.

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