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Last term the son of a senior businessman got caught helping himself to another child's iPod and was

suspended from his fancy London school.
 This story of petty larceny is of keen interest to about a dozen people. To the businessman - who

doubtless gave theCheap GHD boy a rocket - to the boy, his mother, his headteacher, his victim and the

classmates who will have enjoyed the shiver of excitement that comes when someone else gets into

trouble. Otherwise no one cared.
 I happened to hear about it last week and didn't care much either. Yet the story made me wonder what

might have happened - let us just suppose - if it had not been a businessman's child but Barack

Obama's sweet-looking elder daughter who had taken it into her head to pinch a classmate's iPod. Then

rather a lot of people would have cared: in fact it might have cost her father the US election.
 If you are a politician, especially an American one, your children are a danger to you. Their

transgressions become your own, as Sarah Palin found last week when the world thrilled in horror to

find that her schoolgirl daughter was five months' pregnant. Luckily for her mother, an engagement

was swiftly drummed up and political disaster averted, but it was a close run thing.
 There is an obvious lesson here: unless you are childless, going into politics is a bad idea. Even

quite nice teenagers delight in having unprotected sex, getting drunk, taking drugs,GHD pure becoming

anorexic or bulimic, and if you have five children - as Ms Palin does - the chances of one of them

inflicting collateral damage on you at some stage must be close to a certainty.
 By contrast, if you are a business leader your children can screw up as much as they like without

harming your career prospects at all. One could say this was unfair. Business leaders, like

politicians, are meant to be examples to the people they lead. If they cannot even marshal a couple

of schoolkids at home, why should one allow them to lead thousands of workers?
 Three things are wrong with this line of thought. Keeping one's own teenagers constantly on track can

be harder than keeping a company - or a nation - in line. The loving parents of misbehaving teenagers

are often to be pitied as much as blamed. And if the children of politicians and CEOs go off the

rails more than most, it is not the poor leadership of the parents that is to blame, but their jobs,

which generate too much money and fame, and keep them in the office round the clock.
 Shareholders seem to have their thinking on this pretty straight. They are not sentimental about

character (as electorates increasingly are). And from their point of view, if something has got to

give, it is better that the children are neglected than that things at the shop are allowed to slide.
 Children of businesspeople need to go spectacularly off the rails for anyone to take any notice at

all. Patty Hearst got herself kidnapped and joined the revolutionaries, but sheGHD kiss was special. Paris

Hilton is special too - for being the world's most overrated celebrity. She might go to prison for

drink driving, but I doubt if room occupancy rates at any of the hotels founded by her family have

registered the scandal.
 Even when the disgraced child works at the same organisation as the parent the damage is minor. The

son of Sandy Weill, ex-head of Citibank, left his powerful job at the bank abruptly a few years ago

and checked into drug rehab instead. While there was a certain amount of crowing on the internet, the

career of Weill Snr sailed triumphantly on. In his business biography the story gets barely a line.
 In theory, damage could be done when the values espoused by the child are at loggerheads with those

of the parent, but in practice no one minds much or for long. The Queen (who is the head of a family

business of sorts) has as her leading brand value a stiff upper lip. This trait was not in evidence

in the hideously emotional divorce of her eldest son. But did that hurt the queen? After a bit of a

dip, she is now more popular than ever.
 Likewise, Eddie Izzard, GHD MK4 Blackthe famous transvestite comedian, is the son of a straight up and down

accountant. The son's antics do not seem to have held back the father - Harold Izzard has just won an

award for "outstanding service to the profession of internal auditing".
 I can only think of one business person who has been brought down by the behaviour of his son: Martin

Lukes. Earlier this year,GHD MK4 Pink the chief executive of a-b gl?b?l was found guilty of passing insider

information to his stockbroker son and is now in prison, his reputation in tatters.
 The only routine damage a troubled child can inflict on a parent's career is by being so troubling

that they distract the parents from their work. Failing this, children are more likely to help than

hinder. For a start, they are expensive. It costs so much to get them through school and university

that parents need toGHD MK4 Gold work hard and go on working hard for an awfully long time.
 Second, children provide a parallel world. When the office is unbearable, there are children to

distract. And when the children behave in their averagely foul, unruly ways, the peace and

civilisation of the office offers the most blissful refuge.
 But the biggest service offered by children to their high-flying parents is to take them down a peg

or two. Teenagers routinely tell their parents that they are a piece of scum. If the GHD Purpleparent is a

chief executive with a big ego, this is an invaluable service, as no one else would dare perform it.