There are various methods of parenting.

There is the BBC approach, which is safe and politically correct.

There is my philosophy, which is mostly safe and buffoonish, and there was my mother's model which was disturbing and occasionally dangerous.

Let's take the recent furore in Britain over Humpty Dumpty, the nursery rhyme which a BBC programme rewrote to give a happy ending, to highlight the different parenting methods.

The BBC opted for a kinder ending. I would stick with the original, while my mother had no time for nursery rhymes and usually told me to 'go outside and play with the traffic'.

But as the BBC discovered, the Brits don't like it when you mess with their nursery rhymes.

Pepper the night's viewing with puerile reality TV, a sprinkling of murders and the occasional sex scene and there's not a mutter of disapproval.

Change the words of Humpty Dumpty, however, and they are storming parliament singing Anarchy In The UK.

No wonder Prime Minister Gordon Brown is struggling.

Britain is still embroiled in Afghanistan and all the king's horses and all the king's men have made Humpty happy again.

On the BBC programme Something Special, Humpty Dumpty's original last line 'couldn't put Humpty together again' was changed to all the king's horses and all the king's men 'made Humpty happy again'.

Interestingly, the new version doesn't actually suggest how the king's men made the smashed egghead happy again.

Did they gather up the pieces and turn him into a Roman mosaic?

That's the trouble with political correctness. It often replaces logic.

The revised Humpty ending is confusing whereas we knew where we stood with the original.

Tubby egg man sits on an English wall. The wall was built by the king's men. Therefore it was built by an English town council. Therefore it was about as solid as West Ham's defensive wall.

Egg man falls off and dies of a mental disorder. He cracked up.

That's the version I will share with my daughter: It's cautionary (don't climb), realistic (if you fall, you'll hurt yourself) and revelatory (if you call the town council for help, never expect it to show up in time).

My Mother Grim, on the other hand, never bothered with traditional nursery rhymes.

She made up her own. Aunt Sally With The Wooden Leg was her favourite.

In the jaunty tale, Aunt Sally's gold jewellery had gone the same way as her original leg - they'd rotted to dust.

My mother told the story in a voice that was half the Wicked Witch in The Wizard Of Oz and half Bea Arthur, the mannish woman in The Golden Girls.

She banged my bedroom floor with a broom handle, pretending that avenging Aunt Sally was hopping along to kill me in my bed.

Funny, right?

But that's not the best part.

We really did have an Aunt Sally with a wooden leg.

She was 90 years old. She had a real wooden leg. And her voice was deeper than Arthur's in The Golden Girls.

And she was incontinent.

I'm not wishing to make light of my great-aunt's predicament, but have you any idea how difficult incontinence is for a one-legged woman?

She used to sound like a pneumatic drill each time she dashed to the toilet.

As a result, my mother's 'nursery rhyme' scared me to death.

She said she was teaching me a valuable life skill - so I won't be scared if I'm ever confronted by a 90-year-old woman with a wooden leg in a supermarket.

But the BBC is not focused on life skills. It's all about happy endings.

And before the Humpty Dumpty debacle, there was Little Miss Muffet.

In the old days, a spider scared Little Miss Muffet away.

But in the revised version on BBC show Big Cook Little Cook, Little Miss Muffet befriends the spider instead.

If my daughter shuns the company of people to talk to spiders, I'm calling Rentokil.

Children do cope. They survive. It's what they're best at.

They can handle cows jumping over the moon and Georgie Porgie kissing the girls and making them cry.

When I was a kid, the only person who kissed the girls and made them cry was me.

But we got over it. I don't spend my spare time today running around shopping malls, lips puckered, looking for attractive women to make cry.

I got over that phase months ago.

Nursery rhymes teach children the perils of the real world. They learn risk.

Sit on a wall and there's a risk you may fall.

Or sit down with my mother and there's a risk you'll be having nightmares about an incontinent aunt chasing you with her wooden leg.

stlife@sph.com.sg

This article was first published in The Straits Times.