It’s back to school today, pupils rested and refreshed after a week’s holiday. During half-term my children have walked through the Derbyshire dales, had a dodgy lunch in a dodgy pasta place, shopped, played in the park with their friends and waded through mud in their wellies.

It was a breather in the middle of the school year, a chance to regroup, to get away from the regimens of the school day, the relentlessness of tests and the confines of school classrooms. They needed this down time because while two are in their teens and my youngest is about to turn 11 they are still children, who should not be subjected to the same working day as adults.

We had a long debate last week about Michael Gove’s proposal earlier this month to lengthen the school day to nine or 10 hours and shorten holidays.

“If you look at the length of the school day in England, the length of the summer holiday, and we compare it to the extra tuition and support that children are receiving elsewhere, then we are fighting or actually running in this global race in a way that ensures that we start with a significant handicap,” said the Education Secretary.

He threw in the concept of “family-friendly” and insisted it would be “consistent with the pressures of a modern society”.

“Can we go on child strike?” my children asked. “If we had to be at school for nine or 10 hours a day, life wouldn’t be worth living.”

Now, normally, I support Gove’s education reforms – I know he is extremely unpopular with a huge proportion of teachers, parents and pupils, but the education system needed a kick up the backside and he’s had the guts to do it.

But on this issue I am firmly on the side of my children. Education should be geared around the needs of children, not for the convenience of their parents and their long working hours. If the state insists that children start school at the age of four (and God forbid it should be lowered to the age of two, as Gove has also suggested), then it must take into account the fact that younger children have limited energy and attention, they need play and rest factored into their daily timetable and one of their most essential requirements is to spend sufficient time with their family at the beginning and the end of the day.

Children’s needs change as they grow older, but even 14, 15 and 16-year-olds, still growing, still developing, have basic needs that should not be steam-rollered over. While a rigorous education is hugely important for children, teenagers are not automatons who must be educated to within an inch of their lives. Their lives constitute far more than academic studies and exams: they are social human beings who, in order to be viable adults, need to have the time to socialise, to spend time with their families, to go to out-of-school clubs and activities, to just hang out and do nothing.

Condemning them to a nine- or 10-hour day, which is half an hour longer than a typical working day for adults, is tantamount to a kind of prison sentence, as my children put it. There would be no escape. They will not see their home from 8.30 in the morning until 5.30 or even 6.30 at night. In the winter that means they leave home in the dark and return in the dark, and in the summer they miss out on carefree time in the sunshine.

Britain is already the worst country in the industrialised world to be a child, according to a 2009 study by the UN children’s agency Unicef, a study ironically jointly funded by the Department for Education. And in a follow-up study in 2011 children said that spending time with their families made them happier.

Of course it does. The constancy of parents and siblings, as well as grandparents, is the foundation stone of life and to destabilise it is to create a deep crack in society itself. Children of divorced parents suffer “psychological distress” into their adult lives, according to a 2012 study by the Economic and Social Research Council, so how likely is it that children forcibly separated from their families for nine or 10 hours a day will suffer similarly?

I, for one, do not wish to take that risk with my children. I’d rather they achieved lower exam grades and were happier as adults than suffered any sort of “psychological distress” for years to come.