There is an old saying that you can judge a society by the way that it treats its children. We should nurture and respect our young, because they are the next generation. They are our future. If this is so then we all need to be worried.

In Britain, for example, earlier this month a group of experts warned that we are destroying childhood by “poisoning” our children with a mix of “junk food”, mass marketing, computer games and stringent targets for the young at school.

The letter was sent by over a hundred writers, teachers, academics and child psychologists. It read: “In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past”.

The effect of all this is “the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions”, the experts concluded. The letter ends: "Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs”.

In the latest move, last week the British charity, the Children's Society, launched an inquiry into the state of British childhood. They were backed by one of Britain’s most prominent religious leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who warned of a “crisis” affecting children. Early testing of children, he said, was undermining children’s confidence and increasing their levels of pressure.

But here is the paradox. There is no doubt that there are fundamental problems with the way that we are raising our children. We are commercializing childhood and destroying the so-called innocence of youth. But the irony is that while countries like Britain are becoming self-obsessed over our own children, we are conveniently forgetting about how our own foreign policies are severely affecting other peoples’ children, millions of whom are in a far worse state.

To give you three quick examples. Whilst we over-feed our own children on junk-food, our foreign policies are starving other people’s children to death.  Take the Middle East. Earlier this month the New York Times ran with the headline: “As Gaza Parents Go Unpaid, Children Go Hungry”.

The newspaper reported how: "It is difficult to exaggerate the economic collapse of Gaza with the Palestinian Authority cut off by funds from Israel, the United States, and the European Union".

Since Jaunary 25, when Hamas won the elections, New York Times reported how "the authority has paid most of its 73,000 employees, nearly 40 percent of Gaza’s work force, only 1.5 months’ salary, resulting in a severe economic depression and growing signs of malnutrition, especially among the poorest children”

The statistics are startling. Seventy percent of Gazans now depend on the United Nations for food aid. The United Nations is helping to feed 830,000 people in Gaza, an increase of 100,000 since March. The number of people being fed by the World Food Program has increased 25 per cent since March. Jan Egeland, the United Nations under secretary for Humanitarian Affairs says that Gaza is “a ticking time bomb.”

The story of Itidal al-Nazli, a mother of ten from the Shajaia neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, is typical. For the last six months since money started to dry up, her husband has been unemployed. They cannot pay their water or electricity rates. “There is nothing. We don't have anything. The children eat the same food as I do - lentils and beans. Meat? We never see it.", she says. She has no milk for the children either. Her children are literally starving before her eyes. The EU could change this situation overnight by re-starting payments to the Palestinians. In this preventable situation, it is the children who suffer most.

Children in Gaza are also dying another way, forgotten by the outside world. According to the Palestinian Centre of Human Rights, over 37 children and teenagers have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since June. The story of sixteen year-old, Aref Abu Qaida, is also typical. He was killed by an Israeli artillery shell on 1st August. His friend Sharif Harafin, recalls: “We had been playing football and we had just finished. I was carrying the ball. I was going to my home, and [Aref] was going to his home. I heard a loud boom and then I saw him cut to pieces”.  The Israeli military’s excuse for the murder is that on that day a number of people supposedly “approached a number of rocket launchers placed in the area".

So we come to example two. At home we complain when our children spend too much time indoors playing on computer games. However Israel, with implicit US and UK backing, has left a lethal legacy with cluster bombs littering the country. This means that many children cannot play outside because they run the risk of being killed or seriously maimed.

In just the last three days of the conflict, Israel fired an estimated 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. Each of these bomblets can kill. We are now approaching the Lebanese harvest time:  On thousands of small family farms, children help their parents harvest oranges and olives – but they could be literally killed in the process.

Every day someone in southern Lebanon dies – often a child. Frederic Gras, an expert from one of the charities clearing mines in Lebanon, the Mines Advisory Group says: "In the area north of the Litani River, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs. The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they are fired so they become anti-personnel mines”.

Another mine-clearing charity active in Southern Lebanon is the Cluster Munition Coalition. According to their estimates, there have been 83 casualties in Lebanon since the ceasefire. Of these 20 are children. “Most of the submunitions used in Lebanon look like torch batteries with ribbons and others look like tennis balls. They are a deadly attraction for children who make up about 30 per cent of the casualties”, says Thomas Nash, the coordinator of the Coalition. Once again this is a preventable situation.

Finally to the last example: Education. We know that basic education saves lives. It gives children the skills they need to escape poverty, live healthily and have hope for the future. It is generally understood that the right to go to school belongs to every child. In Britain we are complaining that we are over-stretching our children at school: there are too many tests, too much pressure, far too much is expected of the very young.

Yet for millions of children there is no expectation of school at all. In a devastating report last week, the British charity Save the Children reported how a staggering 115 million children are still out of primary school – that’s 18 per cent of the world’s primary school-aged population. At least 43 million of these children –one in three – live in countries affected by conflict.

The charity has identified a ‘blind-spot’ among international donors, who are reluctant to commit funds for education in conflict-affected countries. Donors see conflict-affected countries, where education is vital in breaking the lethal cycle of poverty, destruction and conflict, as not having adequate systems in place to ensure aid reaches the children who need it. Little has been done to rectify the situation. Instead donors have chosen to ignore the problem, leaving millions of children without an education for years.

To counter this, Save the Children has launched a new initiative called Rewrite the Future in over 40 countries. Jasmine Whitbread, Save the Children Chief Executive, said: “This is a crisis that the world is choosing to ignore. Today, 43 million children face the prospect of being recruited and forced to fight, exploited as cheap labour and are more at risk of being trafficked and abused, all because they can’t go to school.”

Once again this is an entirely preventable situation: At the 2005 G8 summit, world leaders promised to find an extra $50 billion per year by 2010 to tackle poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On education alone there is a $10 billion shortfall of what is needed to ensure universal primary education by 2015. Those states affected by countries need an extra $5.8 billion a year to get all children into school. If $10 billion sounds like a lot of money –which it is – compare that to the $315 billion American tax-payers have spent on the war in Iraq.