This can't be right? Week 2

How old does a child have to be before it can form meaningful friendships? Science is divided. Some factions - the psychologists, say that children can make friends from before the age of three. Others – chiefly computer programmers - maintain that you must be about 20 before you form meaningful sniggering kinships with other trekkers (not trekkies - that’s disparaging. Surely they've suffered enough?) and 30 before actual real girls might listen to your tales of microchip overclocking.

Friendships amongst little ones are vital. But they’re the first step to losing control as a parent. Your darling acquires a friend. The friend is a bit older and its parents are lovely. But - and let’s pretend this really happened - the friend is allowed to stay up a WHOLE HOUR later then your darling, and is allowed to watch Ben 10, with all the violence and robotic suffering that entails, and knows all the words to High School Musical 6, and laughs cruelly because your lovely, lovely offspring hasn’t got a Wii with the muscle-stimulating body-part clamp accessories which accurately replicate electrified cage-fighting.

Is this the sort of child your little angelic cherub should be mixing with? Of course not. This is clearly a Kosovan warlord in infant form. But here's the rub - what if this murderous, nocturnal kid is  also confident and clever. What if they're also teaching your little one how to write, spell, do phonetics and yes, how to do sums. What if Annabel, sorry, we’re pretending this is fictional – what if your child loves this evil, slightly older spectre?

You: She’s a genius. She’s got Annabel writing, counting, spelling and phoneticising - and that’s a word Annabel taught me. Which she got from the nocturnal kid, I may add.

The Missus: But this child of darkness is evil. What she’s doing to Annabel’s soul?

You: She can repent later. Let’s get her ahead of the game now, and she can always buy a new soul when she’s bought a Porsche and paid off her mortgage.

The result of all this soul searching was that we relented and let them hang out together. Thanks to the demon-child, Annabel’s really coming on with her reading and sums. She’s also proving to be an expert at our new Wii and knows all the robot head-stomping destruction moves from Ben 10.

We’re really proud.

Dads Space contributor James Leach enjoys rock-climbing, club level rugby and underwater archaeology. However he does watch other things on TV as well. Peppa Pig, chiefly. When not rotting his brain, he writes for comedies, for adverts and for computer games. Although to be fair, doing these rots his brain too.