“WHY don’t you go out and play?” I asked my 14-year-old daughter one night. “Where to?” she said. Exasperated, I joked that she might like to try the bus stop.

She looked puzzled: “Why on earth would I want to go there?”

To her, the bus stop is where you go to catch a bus. To teenagers of my generation, the local bus stop was the centre of the universe.

We hung around the small shelter in our village for hours, lounging about on the wooden-slatted bench, writing our names on the walls – we knew it was wrong, but we were very, very bored – along with the names of boys we fancied.

When I was young, hanging around the local bus stop was a rite of passage for any young teen along with snogging, drinking and smoking. It was the perfect place in which to experiment with cigarettes, albeit in an extremely amateur fashion, wrapping them in dock leaves to hide the smell.

After the last bus had gone, we took over and put our teenage world to rights. We discussed everything under the sun, we laughed and joked, and we moaned like mad about our parents not letting us stay out beyond a certain hour.

Now it’s the other way around – parents literally have to crowbar their offspring out of the house. In the past year my daughters seem to have formed a strong attachment to their bedrooms – or, more accurately, their phones and laptop. When they do go out, they seem lost for something to do.

I was delighted when my daughter’s German friend was staying – they went out every night. They by-passed the bus stop, but they did frequent the park, where they played cricket and rounders. Watching them ambling back at dusk was like a mirror to my own childhood.

But now she’s back to socialising from the confines of her bedroom, through texting and MSN. She wants to be on Facebook, but I’ve drawn the line at that – we would never see her.

I don’t think she’ll ever discover the delights of the bus stop, although with buses running every half hour up to midnight, the community wouldn’t thank me for encouraging the youth of today to set up camp there and intimidate travellers. In my home village the last bus ran at 5.30pm, so after that it was ours.

You have to look on the bright side – at least parents of my generation don’t have to sit fretting when their child doesn’t come home at the set time, or storm down to the bus stop to fish them out and bring them back sulking and moaning.