My brother and I were Children of the Snot. Gasping and itchy eyed, nose-blowing allergy sufferers. When an immunologist drew grids on our arms, infecting each square of skin with a different allergen, nearly every one came up welty and red. Dust mites, cats, pollen, rye grass, mould, dogs - we were hypersensitive to them all. My brother came into the world allergic to milk and eggs as well. When visiting the farm where our grandparents lived, picking up duck eggs and carrying them to the house made him vomit madly.

Children of the Snot are growing in number. Hay fever, eczema and some food allergies are on the rise. According to Access Economics, the number of Australians with allergies will increase by 70 cent by 2050, if the trend continues. This means 7.7 million itchy, snotty, retching wheezers. Now might be the time to invest in the facial tissue and antihistamine industries, given that snot heads spend $120 million a year on over-the-counter allergy medications.

When I was a lass, the way to help children avoid allergies was to protect them from dirty, dusty things. Carpets were stripped from bedroom floors, mattresses protected by plastic, dust-mite killer was squirted on everything. Pets were banned. But now, as you may have read, some scientists think the clean freakery of the First World may have contributed to the rise in asthma, eczema and other allergies among children. So concerned have parents become about protecting children from risk, children's immune systems fail to develop properly, learning to overreact to the smallest irritation.

This brings me to the question I really want to ask. Could the hygiene hypothesis apply to minds as well as bodies? Could parental paranoia about protecting the innocence of children, scouring department store catalogues for the merest hint of child sexualisation, fretting excessively about the lives of tweens actually stunt the emotional immune systems of children?

From what I understand, evidence of growing anxiety among children is anecdotal at best. During the week the Australian Institute of Family Studies released a report entitled Do Australian Children Have More Problems Today Than Twenty Years Ago? which suggested that, if anything, children are less anxious than they once were. Back in the 1980s, 12.3 per cent of parents said their child had "many worries" compared to 3.3 per cent today. Three per cent were "depressed" or "unhappy" compared to 2.2 per cent today.

And still there is an entire modern movement devoted to finding children face unprecedented danger, from which they must be protected. Raunchy dancing, social isolation, internet stalkers, exam pressure, consumerism. I can't help but wonder whether parents who are especially paranoid about all these things, and so insistent about policing the innocence of childhood, send children the message that the world is a bad place they should be afraid of.

I am not saying all risks are good. Clearly, it would not be a good idea to rip the rubber-matting from under monkey bars to replace it with good old-fashioned concrete so children can once again risk good old-fashioned compound fractures. But I do think it makes sense to expose children to a taste of danger and a glimpse of the adult world so they can strengthen their emotional immune systems, rather than becoming hypersensitive to the smallest troubles.

I say this as someone who started out shy and nervous as a small girl but overcame it thanks to parents who taught me the world was something exciting, not something to be afraid of. I was dashed upon the rocks by a fast-moving current at Coffs Harbour and my poor dad had to leap in and save me, cutting his feet on jagged oysters. I fractured my ribs crashing my pink bike at the bottom of a steep hill. My best friend and I watched Dirty Dancing while still at primary school, and performed a jazz ballet extravaganza in front of the assembly to a song from the soundtrack, sneakily chosen because we knew the lyrics were inappropriate: "Yes/We're gonna make love/It's gonna be tonight". We wore fluoro crop-tops and skin-tight bike pants, showing much more skin than I ever would now. And still I turned out relatively normal. Apart from the sniffling and itching.