Charlie's Angels, licorice torpedoes and boys were the most important things in my life when I was ten, closely followed by make-up, clothes, music and more boys.

I would strut around in my cherry red Angels catsuit - forgive me, this was the Seventies - talking via my Tic Tac box walkie-talkie to my pals and fellow Angels Fiona and Joanne. Inevitably our investigation would take us to Mr Ali's newsagents where we would buy a Sherbet Fountain (Fiona), a Curlywurly (Joanne) and a quarter of licorice torpedoes, which I would always have to share because they doubled up as lipsticks when you had sucked them a bit.

When we were taking a day off from being a right bunch of Charlie's, we would lounge about flicking through our mountain of Blue Jeans and Jackie annuals, discussing whether a poncho was too dressy for the church disco, the merits of teaming pink glitter lippy with baby blue eyeshadow, and when, if ever, Donny was going to leave Marie for one of us.

Yes, we did think Donny and Marie Osmond were married - why else would they sing those soppy love songs to each other?

When all else failed, we would talk about boys: what exactly were they for; why did their hair stick out like that; what was that smell; and which one did we fancy most (I could never decide who I "luuurved" more, David Cassidy or Joanne's brother James).

At the time, I thought I was just a girl doing what girls did, but with hindsight I now know that I was in fact a prototype tweenie. I wasn't just copying the dance routines of Pan's People and learning the delicate art of applying eye-liner with a trowel for me, I was doing it for future generations of girls, I was a pioneer.

Many people believe tweenagers - girls aged seven to 11 who are keen on music, fashion and make-up - are a recent phenomenon, that they appeared from nowhere on the stroke of midnight at the dawning of the new Millennium. From first-hand experience I know tweenies have been around for at least 25 years, but now they have more money to spend.

Today's tweenies have between £5 and £20 a week of their own plus unlimited access to daddy's credit card and mummy's designer label catalogue. This gives them a combined spending power of up to £30 billion a year (that's a heck of a lot of glitter eyeshadow) and an increasingly high profile as rabid consumers.

But should we be concerned by our children's overwhelming desire for boob tubes, make-up and S Club 7 CDs and their willingness to hand over bundles of cold, hard cash - usually ours - to get them? Nah, it might be frighteningly conformist and totally lacking in style, depth and ambition, but tweeniedom is hardly sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is it?

Instead we should focus our concerns on the industries only too ready, willing and able to take advantage of tweenagers' naive consumerism.

The drinks industry, for instance, whose marketing ploys are currently under scrutiny after a report by the Institute of Alcohol Studies claimed it was pushing its products to two particular markets - "starter drinkers" aged 11 to 15 and "established drinkers" aged 16 to 24.

The industry, represented by the Portman Group, has denied this claim, but it remains a fact that in England 14 per cent of 11-year-old boys and nine per cent of girls admit to drinking beer, wine or spirits once a week or more. And, since the emergence of alcopops in 1995, Britain has become number one in Europe for teenage drink abuse. Now that really is something worth worrying about.