Before we go mad with the proliferation of Mosquitoes – high-pitched buzzing devices designed to repel the young, with their more sensitive hearing – we'd do well to recall our own teenage years.

I'm not talking about kids beating people up, breaking into houses and stabbing each other – these are crimes that demand police attention, and we shouldn't allow the police or anyone else to brush crime under the woolly carpet of 'anti-social behaviour.'

So if the Mosquito is not a substitute police officer, it must be a tool for the dispersal of kids who are not exactly criminal, merely intimidating, noisy and annoying.
And God knows they can be all of these things. Sometimes it's hard not to wonder why they have to be on the streets at all.

But hold on a minute. I don't know about you, but as I entered my adolescence, I suffered acute anxiety and loneliness. These lifted only when I began socialising with a mixed crowd of friends outside school.

Sure, this involved drinking, smoking, and the first sexual fumblings, but also a lot of exploratory talk.

The crucial point was that it was a world away from the constraints of parents and school. It was intensely exciting. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. And it answered a need so visceral that I can only think it was an entirely natural stage of my development.

My parents didn't like it, but the desire to please them at all times was rapidly succumbing to more urgent needs.
So when I'm told that all kids need is a few good youth clubs where they can play ping-pong in the company of supervising adults, I'm sceptical. Teenagers need time with their peers, away from adults.

There should be some way for society to accommodate this need with minimum nuisance to the rest of us.

There have been some admirable efforts to do so. The youth pod, which didn't exist when I was a teenager, at least acknowledges the need for kids to congregate outdoors.
But the children's commissioner Al Aynsley-Green is right when he says the Mosquito is bound to antagonise.

Don't get me wrong – if I was a shopkeeper, I'm sure I'd want one. But if I was a teenager, I've no doubt I would see it as a weapon ranged against my generation.

The Mosquito is the short-term solution of the beleaguered nimby. It shunts the anti-social teenagers down the road – in a more antagonised mood – to go and bother someone else.
Easy for me to say, you might think. My days of being driven mad by teenage insolence are mostly ahead of me.

My daughter is of an age when her preferences are as simple as enjoying having her tummy tickled, and being scared when placed on her tummy. She likes music, but cries at the sound of the vacuum cleaner. These are tiring, but relatively simple times.

It scares me to think what sort of temptations and dangers will lie in wait for her when the world has moved on by another 15 years.

No doubt I'll appear to her as gauche and out-of-touch as any father of teenagers. It will be painful as well as embarrassing when she tells me that the whole point of her having a birthday party, say, is that I'm not invited.

But I hope I never forget how powerful the urge is to begin the wrench from adult supervision.

And I hope the world that awaits her has more youth pods, and fewer Mosquitoes.

* awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk