My teenagers make me scream and shout, but I count myself lucky when watching Young Apprentice, the latest offering from the TV series in which Lord Alan Sugar puts junior candidates through their paces.

I find it quite unsettling to watch young people strutting about in oversized suits, spouting forth about overheads and profit margins: “I focus only on profits,” says one, on the show’s website. Another admits to having “always loved money.”

It isn’t healthy to be so obsessed, so driven by cash, at any age, let alone just a few years on from the days when they were playing with dolls and climbing trees. But that probably doesn’t apply to these young whizzkids, who were probably reading the FT and dealing stocks and shares in the womb.

The sad thing is, on this programme – as on The Apprentice, the adult version of the BBC1 show – the contestants are actively encouraged to go all out to make money, no matter how unethical their business practices.

One boy, who may turn out to be a lamb among wolves, was lambasted after proposing to charge £1 for an ice cream, while the girls’ team was rewarded for giving extortionately-priced (£3.80) cones to pre-school age children, whose unsuspecting mothers were then expected to fork out for them.

It was painful to watch. “Well, she wanted a cone and sprinkles on top,” the seller – who I assume learned the art of money making from Somalian pirates – curtly told one woman after she objected.

At the end of the task in week one – the second episode airs tonight – both teams made a handsome profit. But the overall message I received was that good ideas and initiative mean zilch if you don’t make the most cash.

Some of these youngsters have got businesses of their own and are already coining it in. They dress for Wall Street while they’re still able to squeeze into Tammy. Thankfully, the boy with a gold watch the size of his head – a head that seemed to get bigger with each successive boast – was fired.

This is another example of children growing up too quickly. My teenagers may be exasperating, they may bicker endlessly, but at least they’re arguing over who has trespassed into who’s room, or who has ‘borrowed’ the other’s hair straighteners, rather than who has invested in the wrong sort of index-linked gilts.

In common with the adult contestants, these Apprentice whizzkids were also shown to be less bright than they profess to be. Despite holding strings of impressive qualifications in maths, they found basic calculations taxing.

If they are the movers and shakers of the future, that’s worrying too.