What’s wrong with playing in the dirt or snacking on a mud pie? Why is it confrontational to have school work corrected in red ink?

Or playing cops and robbers with toy guns? We all did when we were kids, but toy guns are the latest target of the ‘experts’ with the NSW Childcare Alliance now surveying childcare centres to ask whether they know how to handle kids who bring toy guns or toy pirate swords.

The alliance says the centres try to enforce positivity in children’s lives, and that didn’t include toy guns. But kids should be able to grow up with their imaginations and that includes chasing each other around playing goodies and baddies and if toy guns are banned they’d use sticks instead.

Other child ‘experts’ say parents shouldn’t tell their kids they’re smart because it discourages them from taking on challenges. Rubbish.

And nursery rhymes. How absolutely ridiculous these strange people rewrite some of the old favourites which they see as some sort of psychological risk to modern kids.

Like Humpty Dumpty. He’s happily back on the wall according to a childrens’ wear chain and even the BBC joined the ratbag brigade and rewrote Humpty to give him a happy ending …

‘All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, made Humpty happy again.’

Fancy so much hooey about a simple nursery rhyme? Surely today’s kids aren’t too sensitive to cope with the demise of an egg? Or playing with a toy gun?

Before long the Three Blind Mice will be able to see again and their tails will miraculously be stuck back on.

BACK in November 2012 this column gave a then 18-year-old Jason Owen a big plug for his grand final appearance on X-Factor, asking country people to get behind the boy from the bush and give him a vote.

Growing up as the only kid in Albert, a speck on the map between Tullamore and Tottenham with a population of 12, he made his own fun and spent much of his time listening to music.

He sang for his parents Patricia and Neville, who ran the famous Rabbit Trap Hotel that was the model for cartoonist Eric Jolliffe’s pub featured in his Saltbush Bill cartoon series, but in the X-Factor grand final he sang before a TV audience of around two million.

He didn’t take out the top prize but gave it a real shake and everyone in the country reckoned he was a winner.

We were all proud a boy from the bush showed the city slickers there’s life over the mountains, despite being bashed by government, and especially in the small towns like Albert that will bask in his success for months to come.

Last Saturday night Jason, with five albums under his belt, sang before several hundred people at Orange Ex-Services’ Club, his 20th concert on tour. So he’s certainly come a long way since X-Factor. 

TALKING about being bashed by city bureaucrats, the XPT last Sunday was an hour late to Orange because it had to give way to Sydney trains near Parramatta.

Couldn’t hold up city travellers, could they?