My View: Reasons for 'liberal' parenting outnumber the claims against

Outnumbered follows the daily, rather mundane lives of middle-class south London couple Pete and Sue, and their three children – seven-year-old Karen, nine-year-old Ben and 13-year-old Jake. It's not your usual comedy show, in that it's partly improvised, with the children making up their own lines, some brilliant, some tedious (Ben constantly asks "who would win a fight between" two completely random people or creatures). Just like real kids.

The children are opinionated, tactless and a constant challenge to their baffled and bemused parents who, try as they might, don't have all the answers – or any of the answers.

Ben lies (he told his teacher his father had died in Iraq, in a volcano), while Karen is incapable of lying, no matter what. "What's a hypocrite?" she asks innocently the morning after hearing her parents arguing. "Did you hear any other words?" asks Pete anxiously. "Yes. Something about 'mid-life', something about 'pellock'," she tells him.

Sue tries to ignore bad behaviour, while Pete tries to talk to the children, again with limited success (he gives Ben a fiver to stop him taking a power drill to school).

Teenage Jake, meanwhile, finds his parents pathetic and his siblings tiresome. "Can I get a note saying 'Jake was late because his family was useless'?" he asks. Pete starts to reprimand him for doing homework while listening to his iPod and MSNing, telling him teenage brains can't multi-task, but then gets distracted and wanders off.

This is exactly what some people don't like about Outnumbered. The children are cheeky and unruly, while the parents are feckless and confused. One critic even suggested the children needed a darned good thrashing.

I suspect that the group of people most likely to be appalled by Outnumbered are those whose own children have long grown up (successfully, they believe) and now don't understand why modern parents no longer want to control their children through fear. These are the grandparents who like to blame society's ills on liberal parenting, but perhaps they ought to ask themselves why today's parents don't want to repeat the way in which they themselves were parented?

If this magical pre-1990s mix of benign bullying and unsuspecting negligence was so effective, why are so many of today's involved, caring mothers and fathers adamant that it is not how they will bring up their children?

In the third series of Outnumbered, the children have grown up so much. Jake has gone from boy to young man – a reminder of how frighteningly brief childhood is, and perhaps why today's parents don't want to waste or spoil a single second of it.