When I was 10 my parents used to leave me and my 11-year-old brother at the Gare du Nord in Brussels with a packed lunch and a few francs to buy chips on the cross-Channel ferry.

We would take the train to Ostend, then the ferry to Dover and the train to Victoria; and after a brief pit stop at the paedophile-packed Cartoon Cinema we would shovel ourselves and our trunks onto the train to East Grinstead. It took a whole day but – seems miraculous now – nothing ever seemed to go wrong (apart from the time we managed to get on the train to “Moscou” rather than “Bruxelles” when doing the trip in reverse order).

Of course this rugged approach – children were supposed to get on with it and use their initiative – went out of the window long ago. In the late 1930s there was a bestseller called The Children Who Lived in a Barn (reprinted by Persephone Books – nanny recommends) about a bunch of youngsters whose parents got on a plane and disappeared. The kids then moved into a barn, where they cooked delicious stews in a haybox and – as in the best children’s books – had a high old time sans adult or state intervention of any kind.

Since then, as society has grown richer, we’ve encouraged a complaints culture in which health-and-safety concerns lead to children being wrapped in cotton wool – and it’s always someone else’s fault when something goes wrong. Well, now something rather important has gone wrong and we’re clearly going to get a lot poorer. Which means that it’s time for the wheel to turn again – and that, to my mind, means a brisk return to the old ways of raising children.

Now that the house that was my pension is not worth what it was a fortnight ago I clearly can’t give my own children heaps of dosh. I can try to give them character, though, which may well sound Kiplingish and old school, but it’s also the playing-fields-of-Eton quality that once made our nation great.

The first headmaster of Stowe school, J F Roxburgh, said his goal was to turn out young men who would be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck”. As the financial markets have headed south, this concept of character has stormed up the ratings. The Tories have been chattering about it on Glasgow sink estates, and the whiskery ideals of old codgers such as Robert Baden-Powell are now sounding bang up to date even in Downing Street.

The founder of the Scout movement aimed to inculcate “some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make ‘character’ ”. He even described his movement as a “character factory”.

How do you foster these sterling quali-ties? Well, I have some ideas. Playing team sports – and losing. Volunteering. Camping. Travelling solo. Discovering the value of money the hard way – by doing crappy jobs and finding out how hard it is to come by. Having to cope with debt, poverty and “broken” homes.

Many of the more successful people I know have divorced parents or come from backgrounds where money was tight and they had to work in order to eat and study at the same time. Of course it’s also potentially character-building to have a stable, middle-class background where education matters, but that certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all.

As my friend Toby Young remarks: “People say, ‘I want my children to have all the things I didn’t have.’ What they forget is that if they’d had those things, they wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans.”

Think of all the rich people, from Warren Buffett to Andrew Lloyd Webber, who know the rich satisfaction of making it on their own and have no wish to rob their own offspring of that pleasure by leaving them gigantic fortunes in their wills.

So I’m trying not to think of my children slaving their way through university, sleeping on people’s floors until their thirties, eating cat food and never being able to afford a flat. Instead I’m forcing myself to think: how wonderful! They’ll enter a workforce in which the model for success is no longer making a huge pile in the City. Where you can be a success, in the truest sense, by doing voluntary and charity work, teaching, caring or simply being nice to have around. Where interpersonal skills – such as being polite, tolerant and level-headed – will suddenly become marketable commodities. Where testo-sterone, sharp elbows and greed are no longer considered advantages. Where character will lift everyone up to where they belong – and not just the ones who have been sent to good schools from nice homes.

I’m gearing myself up to be even meaner about money so my children understand about saving and deferred gratification, and I’m definitely going to encourage them to do paper rounds and holiday jobs. I’ll be droning on about the importance of smiling, learning how to cook, to sew on a button, to iron, to read a map rather than depend on sat nav, to read a book rather than Google. I want them to understand that they need to persevere and, above all, to be kind.

If I can give my children a solid education, an open mind and a warm heart, not to mention the smarts to get from A to B without calling Mummy on their mobiles for directions, then it’s job done.

In this dawning new order, social capital is going to matter much more than hard cash – and that already defines the next generation as better off in almost every way than mine.

I don’t understand how anyone could fail to see the magical appeal of 1) Mamma Mia! and 2) High School Musical – two of the most feelgood films to appear for many years.

It’s easy. Mamma Mia! has everything: great songs with killer hooks, kitsch acting, Greek locations, Pierce Brosnan singing, Dominic Cooper’s pecs and Meryl Streep belting out The Winner Takes It All. Two brothers – 51-year-old twins – say they have seen it 22 times, and I don’t blame them. I cried buckets both times I saw it and play the soundtrack almost continuously (I now love it even more than Abba’s originals).

As for High School Musical: it’s got cheese, corn, innocent romance – and Zac Efron. But don’t try to analyse these films. The silliest thing I ever read was the review by some middle-aged male (you know who you are, Cosmo) of Mamma Mia!. These are comfort movies, you numpties, not Ingmar Bergman. You’re supposed to enjoy them.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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