Travelling with teenagers can be extremely tricky. Even the best-behaved teenager can get themselves into trouble. Being naïve enough to trust strangers who seem kind, not being mature enough to make judgments about taking drugs or alcohol, or simply falling into trouble through cultural differences.

So what do you do? Teenagers want to be independent. Maybe it’s possible for them to be more independent at home. But what would you do with your teenagers if you’re on holidays in a different culture? Is it all right to insist they hang around with their boring parents the whole time?

You’ve probably all been following the sad story of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old British girl who was allegedly raped and left for dead in Goa, India, after her mother left her in the care of a 25-year-old tour guide, who had just started a relationship with Scarlett. Her mother went travelling in another part of India with the rest of the family and felt she was leaving her daughter in safe hands, and it turned out tragically.

There’s really a danger of giving teenagers too much freedom when you’re on holidays, especially in a completely different culture. To get personal: when I was 15, I spent a month in Germany with a group exchange.

I definitely loved the freedom of not having my parents around to tell me what to do – but looking back, I can certainly imagine situations there where things could have gone wrong.

I was lucky, and I met good people, and ended up having a trouble-free trip, but only a small thing needs to go wrong to change the balance. Transpose the whole scenario to a country with really different cultural values, in a place where drugs and alcohol and partying are the norm, like the beach resorts of Goa – I wouldn’t expect my parents to trust me with that.

One pretty balanced write-up in the Independent decided that Scarlett’s mother problem was that “her hippy ideology destroyed her common sense”. It’s nice to trust people, it’s nice to trust your teenager too, but it’s hard enough to do this in your home country where you know the people, the culture and the customs inside-out.

When you’re on holidays in another country, surely you have to be that bit more careful in what you allow your teenagers to do. They might not like it, but thirty years later when they have their own teenagers, they’ll understand.