London, Oct 12 : Disintegrating families, celeb influence and crime are depriving kids of their innocence, a new report has found.

The report based on interviews with hundreds of parents, school headmasters, employers and primary school children found that kids are forced to grow up too early and are feared to face an unsafe future,

Sending out a warning to parents, the report from Cambridge said that marketing and computer games have an adverse impact on kids.

Teachers, who were interviewed for the study, said that mums putting their career before kids are actually triggering the problem.

Children expressed fear about strangers, burglars, gang violence, knives and guns.

Professor Robin Alexander, who led the study, said he had wanted to go beyond the ideas of metropolitan commentators and tap into grassroots opinion.

Prof Alexander said that though the participants in the study expressed concerns over several topics, the dominant worry was about the loss of innocence among today’s kids.

Most teachers and some parents and children believed the Government's regime of national curriculum tests was too demanding for youngsters.

They also said that they hated 'national obsession with celebrity' and the media’s glorification of 'inappropriate role models'.

"The children were no less anxious about those local issues which directly affected their sense of security - traffic, the lack of safe play areas, rubbish, graffiti, gangs of older children, knives, guns,” the Daily Mail quoted the report, as saying.

The study also found that may school head and teachers did not have a good opinion of parents

Professor Alexander said the interviews have a remarkable consensus.

"The unease about the present and pessimism about the future which we uncovered . . . cannot be so easily explained away," he added.

Michael Gove, Tory children's spokesman, said the report has called for an action to tackle a broken society.

"Gordon Brown refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem but this research confirms that his view is simply at odds with the experiences of the public," he said.

"The very fact that the Government won't accept there is a problem means they will never be able to do anything to resolve it," he added.

A spokesman for the Department for Children said that the government doesn’t believe that kids are over--tested.

"We are committed to improving the lives of children and young people right across the country and we are making substantial progress. The Government does not share the view that children are over-tested,” the spokesperson said. (ANI)