Should five and six-year-old children have their own mobile phones? In the US, Disney markets phones to 'concerned parents', so that kids can call Mum and Dad by pressing a single button. An organisation called the Wireless World Forum is currently researching the "zero-to-four" demographic and its use of mobile phones. (I assume that one-year-olds will have two buttons on their phones, marked "Send Milk" and "Nap Please.") It's all rather creepy, in part, I suspect, because we project fantasies of Peter Pan-like innocence on to our children, and it makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge that they share the same robust greed for digital toys as their gadget-obsessed parents. The don't believe in fairies, but they do believe in pay-as-you-go.

You can see the same painful truth when you go to the local library's children's section. Mine has a big selection of children's videos and DVDs to complement its very decent bookshelves. It would be a delight if most of the children ran past the serried ranks of Bob the Builder, Tweenies, and Teletubbies to pluck down a leather-bound volume of Peter Pan, but alas that's not my experience. They may even lunge for the ghastly DVD version with Robin Williams, in which case you're really in trouble. Yet when most adults in the UK are watching hours and hours of television a day, and serious books seem to play a smaller and smaller part of our lives, it seems odd to expect our children to turn their back on digital distraction and choose the slower world of the printed page.

Any honest parent will confess that we know what our kids want: they want what we want. The mobile phone, like the car keys, the TV remote control, Mummy's handbag and Daddy's gin and tonic, is one of the things we invest with value through the grace of our attention. Kids see that we're obsessed with phones and they are keen to share our obsession. We have constructed a congested, unfriendly urban landscape in which we don't really trust the people we're forced to leave them with, which is unsafe for them to explore because of murderous traffic, and in which we are not with them as much as we would like because we're all too busy working to pay for our mobile phones and cars and televisions and DVD collections. It's hardly surprising to find they want the same tools to navigate it that we use.

When I get off the train and wait for the bus to take me home, perhaps half the people in the line are wearing earphones and listening to music. Most of the other half are studying their mobile phones intently, and either playing a game, texting a friend, or making a call. The ones who are left are usually looking disapprovingly at everyone else, and probably wishing that their iPod hadn't run out of battery power. We are what we do, and this is what we do now. We stand at bus stops calling our partners to say that we'll be home in five or ten or fifteen minutes, a small, meaningless digital ritual that seems to comfort us, at twelve pence a minute to any major network.

I can quite understand our children's desire to own mobile phones, in the same way that I can understand why my two-year-old grabs the headphones around my neck when I get home and demands to hear some music on my iPod, with a look of pleasure on his face. Our children want our toys. Does this mean that they will all get mobile phones and fry their brains, and that civilization as we and the Daily Mail's terrified readers know it is about to come to end? I don't think so. They lack a key skill required to ensure a healthy relationship to consumer electronics.

I remember very clearly the first time I caught myself standing up on a train and turning around to see if I had left my umbrella or laptop bag on the seat behind me. I didn't actually have an umbrella or a laptop with me, of course, which made it easier to sense the importance of the occasion. I had cultivated a new and unconscious habit: the routine sweep for forgotten possessions as one rises. This elegant manoeuvre is timed, like a dance, as part of a smooth exit from taxis, trains, and airplanes, and it means that you will no longer routinely lose things on public transport.

It’s a sad rite of passage, as when the lost boys in Peter Pan return home to London and find that they can no longer throw themselves from moving buses to amuse each other and terrify passers by. They stop because it starts to hurt: they don't bounce like they use to. It means that they have become adults, alas, and must put away childish things.

So I see no problem at all in buying five-year-olds a mobile phone, as my guess is that they won't be able to hang on to one for long enough to damage their brains. Most of the five-year-olds I know would lose their shoes if they weren't attached to their feet by military-grade Velcro fasteners, and some of them still manage to lose shoes and socks, usually when there's been some nasty mix-up at the sandpit. Of course, once you surgically implant the phones in their bodies, you've got a business model. But that would be an awfully big adventure.

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