When my sister had a baby, it used to amuse me that our mother had a campaign against the Cat in the Hat books, which she said would normalise paedophilia (that's not exactly what she said, that's just where she was going).

 So you've got this cat, who comes into the house and makes a mess, but it always waits 'til the parents are away, and tells the children not to mention anything, before it starts sowing its misrule. This is a bad message because a) as a starting point for raising children, they shouldn't be led to believe that it's normal for people to tell them to keep things from their parents. And b) they definitely shouldn't be told that fun things only occur when their parents are away. Helpfully, I thought, I pointed out that this was true of all children's stories. They all start with the parents away, then the fun things happen, then the parents reappear and the fun ceases. I constructively added that she was the most ridiculous person I'd ever met.

 This was because I had not yet heard my friend J's boyfriend's New Perspectives on The Tiger who Came to Tea (viz, the mum in this book is an alcoholic, and the tiger is just a figment she invented to explain to the dad why all the drink in the house has gone; it's actually the start of a series, which was due to continue with many more excessively thirsty animals, a rogue lorry that did pre-emptive recycling, and an opera singer who sings really high and breaks all the glass.

Sadly, the child-dupe of this booze-fantasy became too old for these yarns before they could be completed. That's one of the problems with addicts, even allegorical ones in children's fiction — they're not finishers). I should add that this in no way diminished the work in J's fella's eyes; he just thought there must be something behind it, because otherwise it was stupid. Why would a tiger come to tea?

There is a parenting formula that says however much you have taken the piss out of people before, on a given topic, you will be that factor of mad, multiplied by a lot, on this same topic, yourself. So of course I have developed a fixation with the messages contained in books and telly.

 At the moment I'm worried that an inexperienced viewer of Thomas the Tank Engine will think that one in every seven train journeys undertaken will definitely end in a crash. This viewer will also be very wary of helicopters, but at least there he'd have a point. You think I'm overreacting, I'm sure, but that's because you haven't actually watched them, all you know about Thomas is that he's got his own range of fromage frais. They crash the whole time. And none of them is ever hurt, which I also think is, if not a bad message, a bit of an unrealistic one.

 Safety first! No, in fact, feminism first. It annoys me a lot, mainly in books, that it's always the mummies pouring tea and the daddies coming home from work. I can't think of a book in which a mummy comes home from work, and yet I can, off the top of my head, think of a book in which a mummy has cosmetic surgery (it's called My Beautiful Mommy).

 My mother, meanwhile, thinks there is a racial subtext to In the Night Garden, because the Pontipines are brown and they're really, really small. I didn't get to the bottom of this, because we stalled on the fact that the Pontipines are wooden. They are brown because they're made of wood. They're not from anywhere. They're WOOD.

 It's a pre-verbal thing, because once your children can express a cultural preference, you just have to take it, unless it's a preference for something that preaches vivisection or Mormonism. (I'm not saying I'd never censor; I'm just saying it would have to be pretty extreme.) Funnily enough, I don't remember my mum ever objecting to the Paedophile in the Hat when I was a kid; she was much more exercised about the authoritarianism in Enid Blyton. Is that because, maternally, you just have a fixed amount of objection to lodge on any given day, and you'll attach it to anything that comes to hand? Or am I actually older than Doctor Seuss?

— Dawn/Guardian Service