In the neat living room of the Bennett family’s detached house in Caerphilly, near Cardiff, Indiya, 5, and Evan, 3, are playing a fishing game. All their other toys are put away. Every time Evan catches a fish he waves it in the air and shouts: “Look, Mummy!” And his mother, Rachana, breaks off to praise him or to remind Indiya to cut him a bit of slack because he’s younger than she is.

In between these asides Rachana is enumerating Indiya’s various after-school activities: aerobics on Monday, violin on Tuesday, Latin and American ballroom dancing on Wednesday, swimming on Thursday, horseriding every other Friday.

Peter Bennett’s childhood was less regulated, less organised, he thinks. He took up karate at 16 after being beaten up on the way home from a party, but mostly his activities were more free-range. Some of his earliest memories are of tramping through the countryside on his father’s shoulders, or sitting inside an old rucksack on his back. Even though his own children have busier lives, he wants them to have those experiences too.

“I think it’s important to pass things such as that on to my kids – things I feel are important; learning to navigate, being self-sufficient in the countryside. They’ll reach a stage where they’ll take it on themselves.”

Indiya’s and Evan’s childhood is not so different from Peter’s. His parents – his Dad was a local government officer – could have afforded a bigger house, he thinks. Peter’s children are being brought up with similar values; enjoying many of the things that Peter and Rachana did as children. At weekends the family will often go to the countryside for a walk, as Peter, a partner with a solicitor’s, did with his father.

Any differences are subtle: “I didn’t see much of my dad in the week because he’d have council meetings and wouldn’t come home till 10.30pm. I tend to leave work about 7pm. Once a month I go in for a half a day at the weekend. I’m not sure if my dad did more or less than I do. But I feel guilty when I can’t find the time to devote to them.” While Rachana, also a solicitor, has taken a career break and stays at home, as Peter’s mother did, the decision was not a foregone conclusion.

“My dad would have seen it as his role to bring home the bacon. With us it was different because Rach and I had a conversation about it,” Peter says. “If she’d walked into a fantastic job as we were starting a family, there might have been an argument for me staying at home. It’s important to have a parent at home.”

Peter’s father saw it as his role to support the family, although he would cook for them at the weekend – a source of masculine pride: “Dad is the classic working-class boy made good. So he strove to give us good food. Saturday night was steak night.

That was quite a thing.” His mother, he says, provided a balanced diet, as does Rachana. There’s one hot meal a day and they make their “five a day” fruit and veg into a game. One big change, he admits, is the freedom he used to have as a child. “When I was young we lived next door to a farm. The kids in the village used to disappear for hours into the fields.”

He and his family live on a modern estate – a less rural environment than the one he had. Would he let Indiya play outdoors with a friend? No, he doesn’t think so. “Like all kids, mine are fundamentally innocent, and I don’t consider this to be a fundamentally innocent place,” he says. “I think there’s a perception, rightly or wrongly, that boys are less vulnerable than girls.” But he recognises, too, that Indiya and Evan will need to be given space to grow at some stage.

“You’ve got to do it because they won’t develop into properly rounded adults. You have to gradually let your kids go.” But some things have changed for the better, he believes.

Indiya enjoys school but his own memories of it, especially the early years, are unhappy ones. “I was a late developer and had incredible problems learning to read. My first primary school teacher told my parents I was backward and I would be lucky to get a manual job. No matter how hopeless a child was now, you wouldn’t express it in those terms. The view was ‘he’s just stupid’. In some ways I’ve never got over that.”

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