Watching my little grandson playing in the garden, doing what he calls 'digging in da mug', I realised just how laid back you can be when you are a grandmother. By which I mean that a small child covered from the tip of his fair hair to his little muddy boots in something brown and gungy (not to mention the three worms I saw him pocket) needn't concern you one bit.

All you have to do when he has tired of demolishing a flower bed is to pick him up, take him indoors and deposit him next to his mother. A job well done!

You can stand back when you are a gran, and take in all the nice bits and suddenly remember an urgent appointment with a novel when any end of the child needs a wipe or a wash. And you can watch the development of a baby into a toddler, learning skills and language, gradually revealing a little independent personality, without all those attendant worries because you have done it all before.

You don't, of course, say you've done it all before, you keep your mouth firmly zipped most of the time. Parents get enough advice nowadays, from experts and non-experts; from magazines and television; from thick books and thin books. From the backs of cereal packets and the labels off fruit juice. Turn on the tele any night and you can probably find a programme which is guaranteed to make at least one new young mother have a few more sleepless nights, as if she wasn't getting enough of them anyway.

The only advice a grandparent should give is to point out gently that all babies and toddlers are different and develop differently. Just because your child doesn't climb out of its cradle at three months old and fetch a rusk by itself, as the woman down the road claims hers does, doesn't mean he's backward. Some children talk very early, others use their developing brain to learn other skills. My older grandson could load and switch on a video recorder at two, which quite frankly is something I have trouble with at past my half century. So, you can tell your children, it doesn't matter if little Fiona doesn't know her colours at two and half. Beethoven may have been able to play the piano while still a toddler but I bet he couldn't tie his shoelaces.

I can remember, actually, when my son was a baby we had a friend who was forever comparing his development with her child who was almost exactly the same age. Having heard her boasting that this child had sat up by itself practically as it came out of the womb, was eating solids at three weeks and said 'mum' at three months my husband finally cracked when she claimed he had begun to walk at six months.

'So can a chimpanzee', he said under his breath, although not far enough under as it turned out.

So don't worry if your child is not reading the Encylopaedia Brittannica by the time it's three. Learning to go to the lavatory on its own will be a far more useful social skill to be going on with.

One thing I dread in my grandmother role is being a asked one of those leading questions which can get you into a good deal of trouble.

I don't mean the 'grannie why do you smoke' questions. I know that I'm not allowed to say 'because I like it'. I mean the little moral dilemmas like 'Nan, when is it alright to tell a white lie?'.

Teaching children about truth is one of the most arduous tasks parents face.

I was brought up to follow the example of George Washington who as a little boy couldn't tell a lie and confessed that he had chopped down the cherry tree. Now even at a very young age I quickly sussed that old Georgie was a bit of a wimp and was probably the sort of child who would have ratted on his best mate had he been the one to fell that fruit tree. The sort of child who frequently gets a bit of a duffing up in the playground (I'm probably not supposed to say things like that, but never mind).

It's so difficult, isn't it, to try to get across to an innocent young mind the concept that if they have done something naughty they must own up and get in a lot of trouble rather than keeping quiet and not get into any trouble at all. It's a miracle any of us manage it. We used to tell our three that if they told lies they would get black spots on their tongue. Probably not the sort of thing Dr Spock would approve of, or child psychologists either come to that. But it was amazing how many times we caught a little trangressor having a quick check in the mirror.

But back to the white lie poser.

I used to have a friend, a Yorkshirewoman, who believed in called a spade a spade and did so in forkfuls. Ask her if your bum looked big in something and she would say 'yes, absolutely enormous'.

Consequently she didn't have many friends left, except muggins here, who bore thicky disguised insults on a weekly basis.

I explained to my grandaughter that you told little white lies sometimes to avoid hurting people. That if somebody wore a dress which they obviously liked but which didn't really suit them it was kinder to say something nice if they asked you what it looked like.

She didn't look convinced so I gave her an example. 'You know Nanny's padded jacket with the rose pattern on it which she bought at a charity shop because it had a designer label?' She did. "What do you think of it?'

'It's horrible', she said. ' No it's not", I said. 'It is', she said.

'That's an example of not telling a white lie', I said crossly. 'And anyway, how would you know, you're only a child'.

We're not exactly the Waltons in our house.