There is a scene I recall from the television show Grumpy Old Men which really struck a chord with me.

Don’t get me wrong, grumpiness is not a trait I normally find amusing. It makes me grumpy, if nothing else.

But this was spot-on.

One of the Old Grumpies was lamenting the fact that in a generation, parenting had made a quantum shift from being a largely hands-off, children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard approach, to a fully hands-on interactive experience.

He said it was like somebody had changed the contract.

I had to smile and reflect on some thoughts of my own on this matter, having experienced the transition from child to parent with huge amounts of joy but with a hint of betrayal thrown in.

The Pub: Nothing was ever said out loud, but as a child, sitting on the front steps of the pub when your dad was inside talking about football, you knew the score.

One day when you were a dad, the roles would be reversed and it would be you in there on the stool, bouncing raucous conversation off the cool mosaic tiles, intermittently bringing raspberry lemonades with waxy barber-pole straws and packets of Red Seal chips to the waiting throng.

The random old blokes who you shifted sideways for to let through understood the game.

“G’day Tiger,” they’d say as they passed, licking their lips with anticipation of the first, frosty seven-ounce glass of beer passing the palate.

The friendly wink conveyed a notion that our day, too, would come.

How were we to know that the rules would change so dramatically by the time we were parents ourselves, that the pub-waiting days of stair sitting and perhaps slinging the white ball into the pool table pockets, hearing its woody rumble and watching it emerge from the mouse hole, would become as unfashionable as lime green body shirts.

Now, if you are to risk the scorn of going to the pub at all with your kids in tow, it must be to a “child friendly” establishment complete with computer games, movies, face painting and gourmet kids’ cuisine.

It’s impossible to have a decent conversation about football without being interrupted every few minutes by an excited eight-year-old, with his face painted like a tiger, telling you he just made it to level 12 of Sonic Whatch-ama-callit, and requesting the Junior Jambalaya.

It would be enough to drive you to drink, if you had time to squeeze one in.

The Pushie: The contract stated that as a child growing up in the 1970s, new pushbikes were forbidden.

Only the Osmonds, the Jackson 5 and Richie Rich appeared exempt from this binding agreement.

All the real kids I knew rode their big brother’s old one, and he in turn got it from an uncle, who acquired it from granddad, who might have had a story about purchasing it second-hand for several shillings off a mate of Henry Lawson’s.

Far from the gaze of your parents, in an abandoned quarry or on the big hill leading down to the tip, you learned to ride this oversized machine, egged on by the older boys, equipped with nothing more for protection than a wad of Planet of the Apes cards wrapped with a red rubber band in your back pocket.

These days under common law, a parent must purchase the first shiny, brand new bicycle for their child by the age of two.

And even though this bicycle comes with training wheels and is therefore almost impossible to fall off, and space age safety helmets are mandatory, the parent must personally be on hand to supervise, delight in and digitally record every second of the learning-to-ride process.

When the child eventually travels in a semi straight line at the purpose-built cycle park with soft-fall rubber edging, the parent will then demonstrate the kind of unbridled emotional joy not seen since the tumbling of the Berlin Wall or at least when Evel Knievel announced his next big jump.

Next week I would like to talk about The Pool, and The Party – two other notable categories in which the roles of parents and children have been turned on their head in a single generation.

However, you must excuse me for now, as I have to go and buy my kids new bikes.

To be continued …