Give Me a Break/Kate Holmquist:What parent, when they really think about it, would want their child to be famous? What child who craves the limelight truly understands the risks involved? Fame is a fickle lover. There one moment and gone the next. Fame is as ephemeral as the famous.

I had to laugh when I read yesterday (with a grain of salt) that sometime soapstar Patsy Palmer was seen in her underwear trying on clothes in TK Maxx, because every famous person has to fall to earth sometime, some hitting the ground harder than others.

There are two kinds of fame. The sort that comes from genuine achievement in sport, the sciences and the arts. And the sort that comes from being in the right place at the right time with the sort of face and personality that can sell things - celebrity, in other words. Celebrity brings with it public humiliation, which we're expected to gossip about and laugh at.

This hasn't stopped children these days from wanting to be celebrities. They don't want to go through the hard work of achievement when in the media they see - or think they see - young people who have become rich overnight simply because they know how to work in front of a lens. The people on TV are more real than the people living next door and, from a child's point of view, they certainly seem to be having more fun.

When we were kids, we got our photos taken at special occasions by our family, or once a year in school. Nowadays, children have mobile phones that take pictures and they send them around to their friends. They play computer games in which they sing and dance and see themselves instantly on TV. Children are being brought up in a world that expects them to present a public image that others find appealing. Children believe that fame isn't just what makes you rich, it's what makes you real. You don't exist until your picture is in the papers, your image is on TV and the web. Without fame, you're a nobody destined to struggle through life with all the other nobodies. And who wants to be inconsequential?

I think that the death of community is what we're seeing here. As human beings, we're hard-wired with the need to feel significant, which is a good thing. It's what makes us strive to better ourselves and it's what makes us care for others. The need to feel significant is a survival strategy that gives our lives meaning through our relationships with others. The need to feel that the world is better with us in it, vanity aside, is what makes us give a damn.

In the past, human beings lived in groups of, say, 50 or 100 significant people whom they knew well and whose actions affected them, and who they affected. People lived in villages that gradually got larger, where natural leaders emerged, where everyone knew who the strong people were and who the vulnerable ones were. I'm not saying it was perfect. I wasn't there. And global emigration patterns from the last few centuries prove how anxious many of us were to escape the claustrophobia of community.

But one good thing about living in a community of real people, as opposed to media people in newspapers, TV and Bebo, is that your feelings are real when you relate to real people. Living in reality with real people whose emotions you perceive - as opposed to performing your life through the media - is the ultimate reality experience. You know what's going on next door, you don't have to watch it on Jerry Springer or Oprah.

In a traditional pre-media society, when someone experienced a significant event - a birth, a coming of age, a harvest, a death or a departure - everybody knew, and those inclined to mark the event did so. People knew each other's business because that's how people gave each other the news - by word of mouth on the road, maybe after having walked several miles. Nobody had to phone-text the media to come to the party.

Children these days haven't got that sense of community, where people are mainly concerned about the real people that they live with and around. Today, individual celebrities are as real to them - perhaps even more real - than the people in their lives. When children talk to each other about what's happening with this or that celebrity, they're essentially gossiping about people they know in the same way that people used to at the church gates.

The difference now is that there's a far bigger pay-off in being the person who is gossiped about than there used to be. Gossip has gone global and, in the global world in which our children live, the only way to matter is to be talked about on four continents.

I'm not saying that the inward-looking rural world, where people's reputations could be made or broken at the church gates, was a better place. Far from it. It had its own cruelties towards people who didn't conform, such as single mothers being thrown into workhouses and psychiatric hospitals and so on.

But we shouldn't just shrug our shoulders at the sickness of the celebrity culture we're living in now. Every time we see another young person live and die by celebrity, we're all as culpable as in those days at the church gates. We're responsible for buying the tabloids and watching the celebrity-driven TV shows which appeal to our need to feel connected.

And it's that need for connection that our children increasingly try to fill by striving to become famous.