Last Monday it was my colleague's turn. Today it's mine.

Last week my workmate's young daughter headed off into the big wide world for the first time without her family. She went for a week to a school activity centre - one of those places where kids enjoy climbing, abseiling, caving and canoeing.

"I'm worried sick," my colleague told me, the day her nine-year-old left. "I don't think I'll be able to sleep."

I reassured her, but now realise that no amount of calming words can keep worries at bay.

I was quite calm this morning when I said goodbye to my own ten-year-old, but it was 6am and I was rushing off to work so didn't have time for weeping and wailing.

It was in the car on my way to the office that the unwanted images rose in my mind of my little girl hanging to a sheer cliff face supported only by a frayed rope, or of her canoe tipping upside down just feet from a treacherous weir.

The slide show held to tell parents about the trip - to a Victorian lodge in the middle of a forest - was meant to reassure. In many ways, it did. The staff seemed great and the lodge looked like something from Enid Blyton.

But the images of youngsters hanging by ropes over disused viaducts and scurrying along narrow caves on their hands and knees brought sharp intakes of breath from a number of mothers, including me. We looked nervously at each other, shaking our heads.

If the dads were worried they didn't show it, maintaining macho, that looks great, son' grins the whole way through.

The pictures didn't compare with my first school activity break in my late teens, where the most risky thing we did was eat the lumpy potato that passed for food. We went on walks across the moors and scrambled up and down cliffs - but always on well-worn footpaths.

My daughter and her friends couldn't wait to go. They'd been talking about it for weeks and wanted to do everything. Knowing my daughter, the more nerve-wracking the better. Her overriding worry before setting off was: "Do you think anyone else will have patterned wellies?"

Accidents at activity centres across the country are few and far between, but those that do happen tend to stick in parents' minds. Along with child abduction, it is an irrational fear. There is a far greater chance of children being hit by a car, yet we don't fret about it on a daily basis.

We wrap our children in cotton wool. When I was ten I was walking a mile to school by myself and going up the hills with my friends on a weekend. Yet I won't let my own kids leave the garden without me. My daughter swam in the sea in summer - I forbade it, but my husband overruled - while I paced the shore worrying about hidden currents and poisonous jellyfish.

A week off the leash will do my daughter the power of good. No doubt as the days go by I'll relax a bit and put the vision of her hurtling head first down a dark, bottomless ravine to the back of my mind.

I'm sure she will love it. She'll probably come back itching to join the Territorial Army. Or once I start imposing my rules again - no cycling on the main road', no climbing trees other than bonsai' - she may decide on the Foreign Legion.