Remember when parents thought kids didn’t need seatbelts? Today’s mums and dads aren’t any smarter

Thirty years from now, the next generation will look back at their risk-filled childhoods and think: They loved me yet they let me do that?!'

When Carl Frampton from Belfast was seven years old, his mum thought he was a bit on the timid side - shy and short of confidence. So she took him along to a boxing gym, as you do. The coaches there spotted something unusual about him. Most seven-year-olds burst into tears when they get punched for the first time. But for reasons as much of a mystery to him now as to everyone else then, little Carl shed no tears. He could take the punches. Three decades and two world titles later, it looks like his mum made the right decision.

When I was in my early teens, I was also on the end of some bad stuff at school, so I told my mum I wanted to take up boxing. She said absolutely not and that was the end of that. Another good decision. My boxing journey wouldn't have lasted beyond the first punch. Undoubtedly, I would have cried me a river and walked out, never to return.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist