Three Christmases ago, we almost gave our three children the fright of their lives. We never meant to lead them into something so horrific.

Nothing I have seen before or since has matched it for sheer, ludicrous, horror hideousness.

We left the stark glare of a Rome morning and descended a flight of stone steps. At the bottom, amid ivory crucifixes and the standard blood-weeping Madonna, a plump priest was handing out pamphlets and warning, "No photographs."

"Goodness." We shivered, holding tight on to our little ones, noticing the shadows and then the smell. "This looks... interesting."

We walked along a passageway and into the first chapel. And then, "My God," from Jonathan.

"What?" I whipped my head around and immediately traced the source of the odour.

Everywhere we looked, from wall to wall, across every lintel - even strung from the ceiling - were human skulls, human bones, entire skeletons. Piles of them sunk into every wall. Where most baroque chapels boast filigree plasterwork, this one had filigree bone collage.

On one wall, someone had been witty with - what? Femurs? On another, ribcages joined end to end to produce a bizarre leaf effect. Over there, a pile of skulls, stacked in a neat six-foot totem, still boasted cracked, yellow-toothed grins, as well as ghastly, greying remnants of skin and hair.

The children just stared.

We'd made a mistake. The kids' section of our (normally reliable) guide had encouraged a family trip to Santa Maria della Concezione. We'd believed them, and now here we were in Pol Pot City. Frantically, we lurched into Responsible Parent Mode. There was no question of grabbing our babes and running from this charnel house; instinctively, we knew that would transform this trip into the fuel for a lifetime's nightmares. So, breezily: "Wow, how clever, to think up such a fun and interesting use for all those dead people!"

Jonathan gave a fake, compliant laugh and launched into a struggling translation of the leaflet, explicating the history of the chapels, the honour of being "buried" here, how it gives homage to God and so on. Oh, how he tried.

"I like it, it's... nice," said Chloe, uncertainly.

"Better than being all lonely and buried," remarked Jacob.

"And someone," I added enthusiastically, "has worked really hard to make all these pretty patterns."

"And then his bones got put in too!" guessed Chloe presciently.

"I like the whole ones!" shrieked Raphael, five, as he ran into the adjoining chapel.

By the time we stumbled back up into the bright streets, Jonathan and I were shaken. The kids wanted an ice cream. We wandered up the Via Veneto and talked about Roman emperors.

There are bone churches all over Italy, we later learned. Monks used to deem it a great honour to have their remains boiled down and used in this way. Even so, in our family, "bone church" has become the standard by which you gruesome things are measured. "Not as bad as the Bone Church" is a phrase you frequently hear in the Myerson household. Strange, then, that the experience seemed to leave no scars, no nightmares.

Is it that children at that age - or any age - look to us for their responses and tend only to feel bad, scared or upset when we tell them they should? Or are they just innocent of the brute finality of so many stacked human remains?

A bit of both, probably. But I do know this: while I'm not advocating that anyone rush their toddlers to the nearest bone church, it is sobering and comforting to realise the extent to which our offspring's emotional outlook is shaped by what we grown-ups suggest it should be. How many parents have we overheard solicitously asking a child whether she or he is sad or worried because the au pair is going back to Hungary, a new baby is coming, or someone called the Princess of Wales is dead?

In fact, it rarely occurs to young children to find these things alarming or upsetting of their own accord. Left to themselves, they rightly shrug them off as immaterial. So why do so many parents seem to want their children to emote like Victorian heroines? Am I alone in finding it as ill-judged a bit of parenting as, well, taking your kids to a chapel filled with stripped human carcasses?

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