Knee jerk reactions to the anonymous questionnaires circulating around Norfolk primary schools asking children about their home lives, parental drinking and smoking habits, takeaway consumption and late-night gaming were bound to be outrage.

At first glance, how dare public health busybodies snoop into how families live in their own homes?

It’s taken by some to be offensive intrusion, asking children to snitch on what they see and experience at home.

It’s parents’ business if they row a lot and shout at each other, they say. It’s just “our way. It’s always been like that.”

But a decade ago no one foresaw the explosion in children’s mental health problems which led to the closest in-patient beds for seriously poorly children from Norfolk were in Kent.

So, these surveys to help shape future services make sense.

After taking a 15-minute walk from my office to the M&S shop at the local hospital for lunch and witnessing the gaggle of people smoking outside the entrance and in the bus shelter, the survey started to make sense.

Directly outside the A&E and the main entrance, stood smokers, some in hospital-issue pyjamas, puffing away on tobacco and vaping, while, playing on a loop in the background, an announcement telling them it was a no smoking and no e-cigarette area.

No one took a bind bit of notice, much like the people in the bus shelter, or the man puffing away while he shook and swayed, eyes like saucers. Who knows what he had taken?

If that is snapshot of parents of some children, it is the duty of public health to get an idea of children’s lifestyles today.

Services like Childline are applauded. People subscribe to the NSPCC, encouraged by TV adverts featuring children cowering in their bedrooms while their parents are going at each other hammer and tongs downstairs.

The thought of children worrying is abhorrent – and believe me, children worry when they see their parents indulging in habits, they know are harmful, fearful their parents will fall ill and die because of it.

We wince when we glance over at the next car at traffic lights and see two adults smoking on the front seats and three children belted in the back, trapped in a metal box full of toxic fumes.

Social workers endure brickbats for failings if a child comes to harm by abuse in plain sight.

Onlookers often feel the need to tell someone if a parent is raging in the supermarket and smacks their child with a temper out of control.

I’m not the only one who wants to challenge parents for plonking an iPad on highchairs in restaurants then sitting in silence scrolling through their phones, or parents shoving packs of salty crisps into the hands of tots in pushchairs.

So, to ask children if they ever worried about the habits of people in their lives and if they smoked or drunk themselves – only 10 and 11-year-olds are asked this question – makes sense.

But how else can service providers gauge the shape our children are in, what troubles them, what they are exposed to and how their lives differ from those a decade ago?

Norfolk County Council public health officials’ 18-page questionnaire – part of its Flourish programme - will help to plan future health care for today’s children. Better than guesswork and fumbling in the dark.

Don’t we all want improved lives for children in the region?

Those shouting loudest are likely to be those who moan about children being forgotten, having nothing to do and nowhere to go.

I’m sure recipients are braced for the more fanciful answers of children.

And if the thought of the questions is pricking consciences and making people look more closely at their habits, all the better.

Years ago, a friend curbed her wine drinking after her child told her teacher: “My mummy drinks wine even when it’s not a special occasion.”

Children notice more than we ever think. 

And we want our children to brought up in safe functional homes with healthy parents with healthy habits.

No one likes that idea that their parenting is being scrutinised by strangers. 

But if you have nothing to hide, there’s nothing to worry about?

Thankful for those who work in health services

ITV drama Breathtaking this week was a difficult, but essential, watch to understand the front-line NHS during Covid.

Based on the diaries of Dr Rachel Clarke, its accounts of lack of protective equipment for hospital staff, the choices medics were faced with – refusing cancer patients necessary surgery because there were no intensive care beds or staff to provide after care – and  families saying goodbye to loved ones on Facetime were horrible memories.

It’s only been four years, but I’d forgotten how we lived, the losses and trauma of a tsunami of seriously sick patients as the virus spread through medical teams and the personal sacrifices made by front line doctors we take for granted. 

The doctors who have been striking for better pay and conditions.

We wouldn’t expect investment bankers to work the hours for the salaries, but both are career choices of school highfliers.

Thank goodness those who choose medicine do. 

But, after paying for their own training through the student loan scheme, and working in the conditions they do, no wonder so many flee the UK to take up posts in Canada offering double the pay and better conditions.