Are these Britain's stupidest parents?

This week Joanna and Stephen Pennington poured out their anguish to television viewers as they appealed for their 12-year-old daughter Shevaun to return home.

Shevaun had vanished from their house and gone off to rendezvous with a 31-year-old former US Marine she had "met" in an internet chatroom.

Of course most parents’ hearts went out to the couple during their four-day ordeal of knowing their young daughter had run off with known paedophile Toby Sudebaker, and then was left alone in Europe.

But along with the sympathy there was also incredulity as it emerged the Penningtons had allowed Shevaun unmonitored internet access for hours on end and gave her her own passport because she said she needed it to get a bus pass.

With Shevaun safe and well the public’s sympathy turned to `What were they thinking?`

So, were the Penningtons guilty of being particularly naive and stupid, or were

they the victims of a liberal parenting approach, which allows children too much freedom?

The majority of parents might opt for

the former explanation, especially as Stephen Pennington admitted that, although they had warned Shevaun of the dangers of online chatrooms, they decided against monitoring her use or filtering her e-mails for fear of being overly heavy-handed.

"We told her she wasn’t to give her name, address or anything else to anyone," he says. "As far as we were aware, she was chatting to people of her own age."

Not that they’re the only ones of whom questions about parental intelligence have to be asked. Only weeks before, Minday and Dragon Haipule were desperately searching for their six-year-old daughter Summer, who they had allowed to go alone to an unspecified friend’s house, provoking a massive police hunt.

Yet the tot was found safe and sound sleeping under a cot in their next door neighbour’s house. Who lets a six-year-old out without supervision?

And perhaps the most obviously stupid thing a parent has ever done is to allow their child, who has already disappeared using his father’s passport and credit card - flying to Malaysia and sparking an international police search before being found near the border with Thailand, having hitched across the country for five days - the chance to do it again.

The second time Peter Kerry, a 14-year-old public schoolboy at Harrow, disappeared from his parents, Pat and John, he had a week-long trip round Europe. And while you might imagine he would be attached to a two-tonne iron leash by this point, another worldwide police search was launched a year later after he used his savings to fly to the Dominican Republic without telling his parents.

And there are many more similar tales. But are these just normal parents, or are they particularly stupid, needing their heads examined, together with a crash-course in parenting skills?

On Shevaun’s misadventure, Edinburgh child psychologist Jean Bechhofer says: "Most parents are utterly appalled that that could happen. No kid of that age should be on the computer five hours a day - that’s bad parenting.

"There was something wrong in that situation that this child was able to, allowed to and wanted to. It may have just snowballed, but it is very disturbing that this could have happened.

"The internet is a major issue and

with something which is interactive

with people that you don’t know enough about, then there has to be some supervision of it.

"As far as is possible, parents should be monitoring what their kids are doing, whether it be on the net or playing outside. The responsible parent has to take precautions.

"Similarly, with television, sometimes programmes before the watershed are not necessarily appropriate for all children and that’s something that parents should monitor."

She adds: "You have to judge each situation and put it in the context of the child’s intelligence, the child’s level of development and the child’s ability to cope with it.

"It’s not helpful to a child to have somebody looking over their shoulder 24 hours of the day, because then they don’t learn responsibility for their actions and then they don’t learn how to make responsible decisions.

"But you need to know where your child is all the time, whether or not you’re with them. The responsible parent will have taught a child how to handle things like strangers."

The question of how much freedom to give your child is, of course, a tricky one, and for parents everywhere the whole process seems to be becoming increasingly difficult.

Being overly strict is likely to result in

a resentful, rebellious child and could

be counter-productive, but, at the same time, children are immature and impressionable and need adults to set down boundaries and guide them through life’s hurdles.

So how do you strike that balance - giving a child sufficient freedom and discipline so they hopefully emerge from their teenage years a balanced adult?

If it were a simple formula, it would be worth millions to whomever could patent it. But as every parent knows only too well, there are no hard-and-fast rules, and what works with one child may be completely inappropriate for another.

But are there some basic rules - such as don’t give your 12-year-old their own passport?

"There is no absolute formula for how to raise a child," says parenting expert and author of Attachment Parenting, Katie Allison Granju.

"The goal for all parents is to help their child become a confident, kind, emotionally mature, self-sufficient adult. Anything that interferes with the path toward that ultimate goal needs to be carefully evaluated.

"However, it is utterly and completely irresponsible to allow a child of any age unfettered access to the internet. This is as dangerous as allowing a child to wander a large city completely alone and with no supervision for days on end.

"As for a passport, I see no problem with allowing a teenager access to her own passport - but only as long as nothing in her behaviour leads you to believe that she might use it in an irresponsible way."

The civil rights lobby believes monitoring and surveillance of children can be extremely dangerous. So, at what point does being protective stray into infringement of a child’s rights? And how can parents strike the right balance between being too liberal and being overly protective?

"The best barometer is your own child," says Granju. "Are they thriving? Are they healthy - mentally and physically? Are they intellectually curious and aware? Do they take care of themselves and are they respectful of the needs and rights of others?"

Debbie Cowley, practice development manager at the Parenting Education and Support Forum, says: "Parents do have a responsibility to protect their children - that’s what makes parenting so difficult. We need to make a choice between choosing for them and what autonomy we want to give them.

"But it’s not the case that parents should constantly control children’s access to difficult things, because it’s a parent’s job to help children to negotiate difficult things and equip them to understand what may constitute dangerous kinds of contact. If children are excessively protected, then they’re not going to be equipped for the adult world.

"Sometimes parents so much want to keep their children safe that they prevent them from learning the skills to negotiate the adult world.

"But we know about children’s capacity for certain things at various ages. It’s not appropriate to give children responsibility for things they can’t think through when they’re too young."

As for monitoring their movements and internet access, Cowley says some degree of monitoring can be helpful.

"It’s important to do things like having a talk over the family meal about who you’ve been talking to over the internet, so that there’s openness.

"It’s important that children feel able to disclose what they are engaged in, rather than feeling worried that if they mention who they’ve been talking to they’ll get into trouble."

And a spokeswoman from the National Family and Parenting Institute says: "Parents’ major concern is their children’s safety. It is a constant and profound worry for parents.

"But is important that parents don’t go through nightmares of anxiety every time their children go out.

"However, there are very strong guidelines that young children should not have a computer in their room - it should be in a family room.

"Children go to school and go out with their friends, and learning to let your children go is a difficult transition to make. From children’s point of view, it is also difficult, because children don’t trust adults any more."

But Frank Furedi, sociologist and author of Paranoid Parenting, believes that, while it is a difficult balance to strike, being overly protective can be counter-productive and ultimately detrimental to a child’s development, although he too admits it is unhealthy to allow a child internet access for several hours a day.

"What happened to Shevaun could easily have happened 30 years ago when people had penpals," he argues. "But there is something wrong when parents let their children on the net for hours a day. The kid’s not playing with friends, not playing sport, not doing homework.

"It [the internet] should be an experience that you encourage kids to share with the rest of the family."

He adds: "The very fact that one story receives so much national publicity indicates that we have lost sight of how adults regard children’s freedom to engage with the world.

"The best safeguard is to communicate with your child and to make sure they

learn to handle things around them responsibly.

"Monitoring and watching their every move acts as an incentive for children to lie and to look for spaces where they are not under control.

"It doesn’t make kids any safer. It also sends a signal that children cannot be trusted and it prevents them from learning how to handle unexpected, uncertain experiences.

"If you’re genuinely worried, then spend your time learning how to be self-confident, responsible individuals, rather than policemen.

"Every aspect of children’s lives contains dangers of one sort or another. You either try to prevent them from having those experiences, or you provide them with the means to handle them."

So, it seems the Penningtons were perhaps a little stupid in terms of trusting their daughter too much with her internet activities, and the Haipules, again, with their lack of supervision of six-year-old Summer.

However, most parents following both stories would no doubt also be thinking just how easily they too could end up in the same situation.