TODDLER attack. That was the rather explosive headline used to describe injuries caused by a twoyear- old to another toddler.

The little girl who was the victim of the attack was left with bite marks and bruising to her face.

My reaction when I saw this story was, ‘The poor parents’.

But you might be surprised to know the parents who had my sympathy were those responsible for the attacker rather than the victim.

The victim’s parents are upset and I can fully understand why.

Their child was injured and apparently the girl responsible had ‘previous’ for similar acts of violence.

However, my sympathy waned for them a little when it turned out they had reported the attack to the police.

What did they think officers were going to do? Lock her up?

The child was even referred to by one tabloid as a thug. How sad. She is two.

Children of two can be appallingly badly behaved but surely no one can think it is right to demonise a child of that age.

Instead, I would have preferred to see the victim’s parents – or perhaps it was the journalists – asking a few hard questions of the staff at the nursery seeing as it were they who had responsibility for both children at the time.

Records showed the victim had been hit, pinched and bitten on three previous occasions within the past three months. To me that should have rung alarm bells that something, somewhere was going wrong.

That’s not to say that the ‘attacker’s’ parents are not responsible.

But you have to feel sorry for them because it is incredibly hard to know what to do if your very young child behaves badly.

We all like to think our children are perfect but actually most, if not all, are sometimes unruly.

At two, my son went through a phase of being a little, ahem, robust in his dealings with other children.

We tried tellings-off, time out and stickers for playing nicely. He would be contrite for two minutes but then quickly forgot our warnings.

We finally realised the most effective tactic was to watch him like a hawk and nip trouble in the bud before it happened.

The bad behaviour stopped but I’m not sure that was anything to do with us. He just grew out of it.

So spare a thought for this little one’s parents. It could be you