by Fiona Gibson

I spent the first couple of years of parenthood in East London where the emphasis was firmly on 'doing things' with your children. There were dance workshops for toddlers, even painting classes for babies, at which my sons would scuttle about on the floor, always managing to locate something treacherous, like a drawing pin.

My week would be scheduled to the hilt. If I wasn't attending local groups, I'd feel obliged to take the boys some children's farm in Hertfordshire to view a few polluted-looking llamas. I'd screech into a pub car park on the way home, and beg the barmaid to warm the kids' milk. There were so many events to remember, so much stimulation to squeeze into the week, that the calendar buzzed with reminders. I could barely remember where we lived.

Why do we put ourselves through this? Left to their own devices, young children don't ask for much. Show them a churning washing machine, or rain streaking down a window, and they'll gawp at it for hours. In packing kids' lives with experiences, it's easy to forget what small people enjoy most: taking a bite from each item in the fruit bowl, and seeing what happens when they hold a Clinique powder compact under a running tap. Those simple pleasures - discovering whether the remote control sinks or swims when dropped into the toilet - are being lost. Take a kid to a shopping centre and he expects to be wheeled about in a red plastic vehicle and have his face painted by a clown. How many treats do children really need?

My friend Liz, mother to three sons, says all she can recall from her childhood is dismantling dry stone walls to grind into fine powder - yet regularly takes the boys to Legoland, or for a spin on the London Eye. I wonder if the youngest (aged three) appreciates her efforts. The first time I brought my sons home from the zoo, their fleeces adorned with I WENT WILD AT EDINBURGH ZOO stickers, they asked, 'What are we doing today?'

'You've just been to the zoo!' I roared.

Of course, day trips are worth all the effort and expense - sometimes. For one thing, there's too much for your kids to look at and take in to even think about punching each other in the stomach. There's no Action Man's husky to grapple over, no kitchen drawers in which to trap each other's fingers. On those long, long days at home, when one of my kids has tried to impale a sibling on a long-handled barbecue fork, an impromptu trip has saved our bacon. I've found that pleasure factor (for the adults, that is) is increased 300-fold if I've been sorted enough to.

•  Present the day out as a fait accompli. No discussion about where to do - zero consultation. If you have more than one child, they'll disagree on where to go just to spite each other. If you ask anyone of preschool age where they'd like to go, answers range from ' Africa ' to 'the kitchen'. You know best. You can, of course, disguise an adult-oriented outing as a 'mystery tour', then watch their crestfallen faces as you pull up at Ikea, or a country house with magnificent gardens, when they thought they were heading for an adventure playground the size of Glasgow.

•  Choose destinations no more than an hour's drive from home. Any further and the yowling and howling, the stops for nappy change/toilet/snacks/puking episodes cancel out any fun derived from the trip.

•  Bring a picnic (even if it's bucketing down). Most food on offer at child-friendly attractions is overpriced crap - lumps of frozen stuff flung into the fryer that you'd feel bad flinging in the path of a starving stray dog. Kids, of course, adore this junk.

•  Avoid buffeting crowds by going mid-week if possible.

•  Swerve the ubiquitous gift shop. If you're forced in there, at least have a pound coin handy for each of the kids so they can choose a tiny souvenir and not some whopping soft toy to join the 8 million other soft toys you have at home. If they bray for plastic tat, and you give in, console yourself that the particularly nasty item will be wrecked by the time you get home.

•  Let them bring toys to play with in the car, but leave them in the car (many a day out has been ruined by having to perform a speedy U-turn because ratty old Biscuit - a matted dog that smells kind of cheesy - has been left behind in a castle dungeon). Do avoid bringing anything that really matters to your child or you'll discover that, on arriving back home, it's still in the tearoom in Cromer.

•  Ditto, let them bring a friend. Resign yourself to the fact that he'll have brought no money of his own, and will say very little apart from, 'I'm thirsty'.

•  Bribe an adult friend to keep your company and share the responsibility. Choose carefully, though, as the wrong grown-up companion can utterly wreck your day. One friend watched, horror-struck, as my kids clambered all over a ruined abbey. 'Wanna get on that wall,' her son muttered.

'No, Charlie,' said his mother.

'But they're on the wall. She lets them climb.'

'Fine - but we don't do that.'

Other fellow parents offer more direct criticism. They think that, being a vague acquaintance of yours and having produced kids themselves, they are therefore Boss Of All Children and allowed to reprimand anyone under the age of sixteen for so much as flicking pebbles into a river.

One sunny day, on a walk in the woods near Dolphinton, my sons picked up sticks to waggle about (what else are woods/sticks for?). 'Hold that stick lower,' warned the other child's mother. 'You'll have someone's eye out.' My sons continued to brandish twigs, sabre style. 'Point your stick at the ground,' thundered the woman. My sons were in bother for carrying sticks at the wrong angle.

Sometimes it's easier all round to just stay at home.

© Fiona Gibson

Fiona Gibson writes for many publications including the Observer, Red magazine and the Sunday Herald, where she has contributed a weekly column for the past four years. She has written two novels, Babyface and Wonderboy, both published by Flame. This extract was taken from The Fish Finger Years, her book about the messy realities of child-rearing which was published by Hodder & Stoughton on June 20.

Fiona lives in Biggar, South Lanarkshire, with her husband and three young children.