Discipline is not about punishment. Ideally,it begins from the earliest stages in a child’s development with parents and adult carers helping children to understand what is right and wrong whilst creating a secure place from which to experiment and learn about life.

Having a teenager in the family can be tough. As a parent, you might feel that overnight your son or daughter has become sulky, bad tempered and seems to want to do nothing but shock you. But teenagers themselves may be feeling that they are going through a tough time too.

Media reports about young people joining criminal gangs make it easy to believe this is widespread, which is not the reality according to the statistics of the number of young people actually caught up in gang membership