Yesterday I went to buy a present for a friend’s new baby. With £20 to spend, I didn’t linger over the baby cashmere, the silver teething rings or even Baby’s First Lap-top; in the end, I bought a boxed set of Beatrix Potter books. All human life is there in a format designed to fit perfectly into tiny hands.

One of the things I didn’t buy for my friend’s baby was a £19.99 pair of miniature high heels in pink satin (with a choice of diamante or leopardskin trim), which, according to their maker, Heelarious, “provide the finishing touch to any party outfit”. These miniature Manolos are aimed at babies who can’t yet walk; they dangle at the end of pudgy legs like flippers, their only function presumably being to make onlookers coo and say: “Oh, she’s started with the shoes already, how adorable” – rather than the more obvious response, which includes the words fool, money and parted.

These shoes are being imported from the United States – where they have been wildly successful – by a canny entrepreneur who has spotted the gaping chasm in the baby footwear market. My suspicion is that they will be equally popular here, despite the protests from children’s charities, such as Childline, which condemn baby high heels – along with pole-dancing kits for prepubescent High School Musical fans and Etam’s thongs for nine-year-olds – for sexualising children.

This may be the case, but my feeling is that men such as the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who are determined to abuse children, are hardwired from an early age. I don’t believe they start seeing babies as sexual objects because they are wearing leopardskin stilettos. My objection to the Heelarious shoes and all the baby Tod’s, miniature biker jackets, tiny Ray-Bans and baby Birkin bags (yes, really) is more to do with what they represent: a perverse desire to end childhood before it has even begun. I wouldn’t be surprised if the purchasers of Heelarious shoes are also buying Baby Einstein flash cards and taking their toddlers to art appreciation classes or mini-manicure sessions.

The smock market is in freefall – the coming breed of mothers want their children to look like adorable miniature versions of themselves. What better accessory to tote around than a tiny fashionista? Children are the new handbags.

There is nothing new, of course, about treating children as miniature adults: think of Velazquez’s portrait of the five-year-old Spanish infanta, dressed like a court lady in a 3ft-wide farthingale; or the infant John Stuart Mill, who was taught Greek, Latin and Hebrew from the age of two; or Lady Jane Grey, writing Petrarchan sonnets at the age of six. But in the 16th century, or even 100 years ago, there were sound practical reasons for forcing children to grow up early: if your life expectancy is 30 years and you run the risk of being orphaned before you reach puberty, it makes perfect sense to grow up quickly. Tudor hothousing wasn’t about keeping up with the Hapsburgs but about survival.

Today’s children, on the other hand, have the longest life expectancies on record and can be reasonably confident about having their parents around long after they become parents themselves. In actuarial terms, there has never been a better time to be a child, but instead of celebrating this fact we seem determined to make childhood the anxiety-ridden, narcissistic shopping trip that adult life has become.

Hanging out in Claire’s, an accessories shop dedicated to bringing out a little girl’s inner Cher, I heard one six-year-old moppet tell another that pink nail varnish made her look babyish – Kate Moss always wears black.

There is a spookily apposite F Scott Fitzgerald short story, which has just been made into a film with Brad Pitt, called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s about a baby who is born old and lives his life in reverse. I suspect that today’s babies, dressed in miniature Chanel and clutching velour mobile phones, face the same fate. Their childhoods aren’t about mud pies, midnight feasts and the joys of picking off scabs; their formative years are now crammed with accessories and achievement (there are girls in my eight-year-old’s class who require a term’s notice for a playdate.)

But somewhere around the age of 20, these miniature adults become babyish – big kids who have no desire to do “adult” things like leaving home, getting married, doing their own laundry and wearing lace-up shoes. In the 1950s, you wore shorts or smocks until it was time to put on long trousers or a girdle and look roughly the same age for the rest of your life. Today, a distressing number of women dress more like teenagers the further they get into their thirties, and shorts are no longer the preserve, tragically, of little boys.

Look at the leagues of thirtysome-things dropping out of the rat race (read “adult life”) so they can move to the country and recreate an Enid Blyton fantasy. Look at the rebirth of the wellington boot as an object of desire. Babies are wearing high heels, but grown-ups just want to splash in puddles.

There are more young adults in their twenties and even thirties living with their parents than ever before. And really, who can blame them for their failure to launch? If your childhood has been spent filling the unforgiving minute with mini-makeovers and baby Dolce & Gabbana, independence looks a lot like lying about in sweatpants watching Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield. If you’ve never had the chance to be a kid, why would you ever want to grow up?

Last week was a good one for security guards in Portsmouth. The council is bringing in a new form of CCTV, which tells them when something interesting is going to happen on those grainy black-and-white screens. The cameras, loaded with softwear that “recognises” suspicious behaviour, can spot crimes before they actually happen.

“It can alert the operator to something that might be interesting, such as a guy hanging around or somebody running,” says its creator, Nick Hewitson.

“Of course, what the camera can’t do is predict whether the guy is waiting around to meet his girlfriend or to commit a crime.” Any further course of action is left to the security guard’s discretion.

I wonder how many operators will leave the comfort of their control room to find out whether the loitering man has a ring in his pocket or a snub-nosed automatic pistol. My guess is that once alerted, the security guards of Portsmouth will stare at the screen to find out what happens next.

Far from taking us one step closer to Minority Report, as the makers claim, these cameras are the CCTV equivalent of Sky+ – you need to watch only the good bits.

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