It happened over a few days – an accumulation of irritating pinpricks of feebleness that led me to conclude that we have become a nation of wimps. I’m very active on Facebook (with a personal page as well as a community page, Bel Mooney-Writer) and it was there I started noticing the bleats.

The young author of a single novel confided that writing was 'agony' and 'an unbearable strain.' A woman whose daughter was packing to go off to university wailed that she felt full of 'grief' at the parting, and many people 'liked' this - agreeing that waving goodbye to their teenagers was one of life's cruellest traumas.

Then a reader of my Daily Mail advice column wrote to chide me for being 'mean' and 'hurtful' in my robust reply to a problem, when I had merely suggested that the guy who fancied himself in love with a woman he'd known for five minutes was deluding himself and needed to get real.

Naturally I'm continuously driven mad by the on-going rows in our universities about 'offence' given to this minority group or that. And I often wonder how many people who even go to law because of their hurt feelings were treated with kid gloves when they were children, turning them into adults who can't cope with the rough and tumble of life. A society which encourages nervous young mums to use antiseptic spray cleaner on every surface including the high chair is in thrall to wimpishness of the highest order.

When did we start making so much fuss about everything? As a child of
the fifties I remember falling over and skinning my knee and accepting this as a natural result of play. If my mother saw the graze she'd say briskly, "It'll be all right' – and carry on with what she was doing. In contrast, the other day I saw a young mother almost have hysterics because her child has scratched his arm on a rose bush and she blamed the dad for not preventing this grave injury.

"Oh come on!" I want to shout, "Toughen up - all of you!" My parents' generation (born in the 1920s) had to put up and shut up, because there was no alternative.

Whenever I ask my mother if she felt upset by something that happened during her hard life, her response is always the same: a philosophical shrug and "You just got on with it."

We baby boomers were the same, weren't we? Nobody I knew moaned about freezing floors and iced up windows (on the inside), or masses of homework, or having to write lines for misbehaviour in school, or strict uniform rules, or measly jam sandwiches for tea…because that's how it was. For everybody. Yes, we 'had it so good' later on, but as kids we were packed off to play out in all weathers. And never got a cold.

But now crying and complaining seem to be the common responses to everything. Young women take offence and get angry if a man pays a compliment and the fuss goes on for weeks. Each one of life's hardships sparks discussions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, when the truth is this: pain is normal and so is sadness and you do - in the end - get over it. So try to control the fuss factor. Please.

Bel's new book Lifelines: Words to Help You Through is published by The Robson Press and is available from Amazon now.