PARENTING is about judgment. Making judge meats of others, that is. Other people are invariably doing things differently. And if they're doing things differently, they are doing things wrong.

There's nothing wrong with being judgmental. It's quite healthy really. If you are smugly confident as we all are that your children are the most sublimely superior beings on the planet, then it naturally follows that you are the most sublimely superior parents.

With the debunking of theories of "original sin", adults are starting to claim that children are inherently "good", and thus that personality flaws and anti social habits are far more likely to derive from poor parenting than from any genetic predisposition to "badness". Forget poverty and disenfranchisement it's time, they say, for parents to carry the can.

In theory, I could not disagree more with this tendency to overlook relevant social factors. In practice, I am ashamed to say, knee jerk reactions overtake me.

My eldest child was a paragon of virtue. He would wait for his turn on the swing and deal with conflict situations without resorting to force. His gentleness made any assault on his bodily integrity seem more acute. There was the child that punched him in the park and the horror in the toddler group who smashed him over the bridge of the nose with a pop up farm. "What do you expect?" I thought. It's probably the parents' fault.

Of course I put my child's good nature down to the way we were bringing him up lots of love, absolutely no smacking, consistency, teaching responsibility. We were right and our child was the living proof.

And then something happened, something that made me doubt my firmly held views about parental culpability. And it happened in the shape of the most beautiful 8lb 10oz baby boy that ever drew breath.

He is lovely, he's cute and clever and funny. I adore him, his Dad adores him, his brother adores him but the parents of other toddlers are finding it hard to generate the same levels of positive emotion.

It started with his brother. He would walk over to the reclining four year old, lean over as if to kiss, then take the most almighty swipe at him. As his social life improved, he moved on to children nearer his own size.

There was the child in the park the one whose cheek he latched on to with his teeth until he was prised away. There were the three lovely little girls who visited at Christmas but left scarred and screaming at the prospect of being in the same room with him.

We don't smack him though people have looked to us to do so. How would hurting him help him to stop hurting others? We give him consequences but a one and a half year old understands very few. Removing him from the situation and keeping him there is about all we can come up with.

We are floundering. We're hoping it's just a phase. After all, I told his Dad, he won't be going down the pub and scratching the face off people when he's 20. His Dad wasn't convinced.

I blame the parents.