THERE'S a point in every parent's life when the fledgling flies the nest and makes their own way based on their own principles, their own resources and their own decisions.

But every parent will tell you that's often the hardest part of parenthood - caring, but no longer having any control over your child's destiny.

So spare a thought for Anne Wilding. She received a call from daughter Jo at 7.30pm, yesterday, explaining that the "very sweet" locals she'd spent the previous 24 hours with had, in fact, been Mujahadeen kidnappers roaming the streets of Iraq's most troubled city, Fallujah.

The 29-year-old - no stranger to the occupied country's hottest spots and an occasional name in these pages - was trying to help injured Iraqis when she and six or seven other foreign activists and aid workers were captured.

Readers might remember her e-mail despatches during last year's Iraq War, a series of personal views of the effect of bombing on a people already devastated by sanctions.

At the time, we voiced our concern that, while few would doubt her passion for the cause, her fervour had taken her so close to the action that she'd lost sight of the potential consequences.

Her mother doesn't need us to help her realise that yesterday's kidnap scare could have ended up very, very tragically.

Yet she expects nothing to change.

"I'll be very surprised if she changes her mind and comes back," she says. "I trust her judgement, but will be glad to see her when she gets home."

There'll be thousands who are grateful they're not her.