APIECE of research on the amount of money that British children get from their parents got me thinking recently.

The report suggested that they might get an average of £261 a year in addition to their weekly allowance. Could it be that inflation has ballooned the price of bouncy balls and penny chews?

Or might it be that your average teenagers favourite pursuits (buying video games and drinking cider in the park) costs a bit more than the tuppence a week that our parents used to get?

I'm no-one to get high and mighty about this subject. I was pretty spoilt as a child. I think my mum and dad, who weren't exactly rolling in it as children themselves, made up for this by making sure me and my big sister didn't go short for much.

Perhaps it was memories of receiving a lone tangerine and a button on Christmas day that lead to them buying us fancy dolls houses, trendy roller boots and the like -- all of which, of course, were gratefully received.

But, although, happily, such generosity didn't corrupt us into nasty mercenary individuals (quite the opposite, in fact) it did leave me without a grasp of the value of money that those friends who, from an early age, had to work for whatever money they received.

It makes sense, really doesn't it? If you have slogged your guts out for eight hours in a shop, then that £15 will be spent a lot more carefully than if it pops "off the money tree" and into your hand every time you turn on the charm in order to buy a new CD.

Treating children might not do any harm, you may think, but in the long term it surely can.

This study concluded that the financial lessons people learn as children tend to stay with them in later life.

Luckily for me I inherited my dad's antipathy towards debt, so that even a mild library fine brings me out in a cold sweat, otherwise I'm sure that I'd be in hock to a one-eyed loan shark named Fingers by now.

But others aren't so lucky. The idea of free cash, implanted in them as a child, starts to take over and suddenly it makes perfect sense to buy a car which you will spent the next 50 years paying for (by which time if you aren't too old to drive it, you'll certainly be less enamoured of its charms -- especially when everyone else is driving round in hover-cars.)

And, what is the hardest lesson to learn? Well, that those who hand you the 'free' money aren't as keen to write it off as your dear old dad.

The moral of the story is, teach your children the value of money because, however cruel it might seem now to refuse them, its even crueller to condemn them to a life of consolidated loans, credit card payments and still getting weekly hand outs from their parents. And imagine what inflation will have done to pocket money by then?