Conversely, nothing appeals to me more than going to the Polka or Unicorn in London, both of which specialise in children’s theatre, and hearing a mass gasp of wonder when the lights dim.

Audiences aged up to 9, 10, 11 have an innocent expectation of thrills to come that you never find in a darkening cinema. The question is: what kind of theatre best fulfils it? What’s most calculated to create the eager theatregoers of tomorrow?

The first and obvious answer is a drama, comedy or show that’s unarguably more alive than the canned offerings of screens small or large. That might even include what passes for Christmas pantomime nowadays.

True, modern panto tends to be formulaic and over-reliant on celebs. Yet what’s formulaic to parents isn’t necessarily so to their children, and when the famous TV personality or sportsman comes forward as Widow Twankey or Buttons to lead them in a singing or shouting session, they’re delivering an important lesson: nothing beats the immediacy, the personal contact, the give-and-take of the living event.

But there’s a still more important lesson. There’s nothing like live theatre for exercising that underused muscle, the imagination. Give a child a stick, and it can become a wand, a mast, a sword in a series of twinklings. Good theatre appeals to exactly this creative instinct and develops it. Why has Susan Hill’s Woman in Black run at the Fortune for 17 years? Partly because a whole world, from cabbies to lawyers and horse carriages to gothic mansions, is evoked by two actors working with little more than the contents of a hamper.

But there’s another reason for that play’s success. Both times that I’ve seen it I’ve heard a mostly teenage audience scream, and I mean scream. Its collective spines had been drastically chilled by the parchment-faced title-character who materialised over the hero’s shoulder and the locked door that slowly opened to the sound of death and disaster. You can’t imagine an afternoon play on the BBC generating that sort of excitement, intensity and exhilarating terror, can you?

Though we often think children less resilient than they are, that would admittedly be a bit too scary for some. For the very young, I’d recommend a start at the Polka in Wimbledon, which regularly combines another essential ingredient, a clear and briskly told story, with ultra-simple stage effects: the briefcase that became a snapping dog in Stuart Little, for instance, or the falling fruit that becomes a mix of house, boat and plane in James and the Giant Peach.

From there a child might move on to The Lion King, with its wonderful evocations of African zoology; from there to the likes of Tim Supple’s Grimm Tales, perhaps the most inventive of the Young Vic’s attempts to restore oddity and grisliness to the old stories; and from there to, say, Helen Edmundson’s brilliant Coram Boy, which is about to be revived at the National.

Last year my adult companion, witnessing the play’s hangings, drownings and buryings of murdered babies, turned to me and said: “This is for children?” Yes, and more. It’s a stepping stone to Phelim McDermott’s Shockheaded Peter, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Euripides’ Bacchae and, indeed, Macbeth.

It’s perfect preparation for that branch of life called theatre — and that branch of theatre called life.

Tanya Byron, child psychologist

If a child is old enough to sit in front of the telly, he can go to the theatre. And it’s harder the longer you leave it; if your two-year-old is struggling, people will be understanding, but if it’s an eight-year-old, people will be less tolerant.