HERE are just three of the 750 things I swore I’d never do when I became a parent.

1. Give in to repeated requests for finger buns or plastic spider people in supermarkets (sorry, but there’s a limit to the number of Iwantatreats I can take before something inside me breaks).

2. Use the TV as a babysitter (sorry, but its hourly rates are reasonable, it’s never clubbing with its boyfriend that night and I don’t have to drive it home to Parramatta afterwards).

3. Fib to avoid discussing difficult concepts (sorry, but there’s only so many toddler-friendly ways to explain tampons, the DVD cover of the vampire series True Blood and the use of the word “black” in relation to humour — particularly if I’m suffering from iwantatreat-related ruptures when asked).

Fortunately most of the time I’m a pretty reasonable sort of mother. Fortunately most of the time I read my three-year-old books in engaging voices, feed her actual vegetable matter and patiently explain stuff like why the squished beetle stopped moving and why she can’t grow herself a sister in her tummy.

Still, every so often I catch myself doing something so utterly out of synch with my preconceived ideas of the sort of parent I was going to be, that I hardly recognise myself.

Lately I’ve been taking Alice to a big shopping centre when there’s absolutely nothing we need to buy. Hours we spend, there. Hours riding trolleys, escalating to nowhere on the travelators and ooh-ing and ah-ing at consumer society’s glittery promises.

We’re here because it’s too hot to play outside, is what I’ll say if you ask. Because it’s too cold or too rainy or the usual places are too closed or too overrun with school holidaymakers.

But the real reason is that some days I’m just not up to providing the intensity of engagement my daughter demands.

Critics claim that kids today are the overscheduled and overstimulated overlords of a tyrannical kindergarchy. They say a set of alphabet wooden blocks should be the only entertainment one’s offspring require from birth until they leave home to create easily amused families of their own.

But Alice didn’t get the blocks-are-enough memo so — on days when I simply cannot muster the physical or psychic strength to build another pachyderm out of playdough — off we trot to the big shopping centre where the shiny bells and whistles share the motherload. The decision is not without its drawbacks.

Many of my friends think shambling around shopping centres simply for the sake of it is both Kath & Kim crass and parentally irresponsible. Even if we don’t buy anything, they say, Alice is being osmotically indoctrinated into the cult of mindless consumerism.

I, however, suspect mindless consumerism is under more threat from us.

Alice is old enough to know that the sparkly things in shops are not our things so we can’t simply walk off with them. But she’s not old enough to appreciate the subtle conventions relating to what is and is not kosher in window-shopping contexts.

There is a strong correlation between one’s amenability to imminent commerce and the degree of physicality permitted with commodities. Thus it would be odd for someone who is officially “just looking” to spend a long period of alone time with 10 pairs of jeans in a change room (though the brief holding up of a pair in front of one’s jeans-wearing areas would be OK).

Alice, however, ignores the crucial role of intent in shopping centre protocol, taking unsettling liberties with stock she knows we have no intention of buying. These liberties include but are by no means limited to the:

TRYING on and prolonged fondling of jewellery with peacock feathers.

TENDER palpating and smelling of suction-sealed mozzarella cheeses.

REMOVAL of attractively spined novels from bookshop shelves and the stacking of said texts into colour-compatible towers.

PAINSTAKING application of tester lipsticks not on to the recommended body part but into her elbows.

My daughter never damages or soils these goods. In fact, taking elaborate care and putting items back precisely where she found them is an essential part of the process. But clearly she is crossing a critical line in which browsing becomes utilisation.

Does this mean what we’re doing is a form of stealing? Or do we simply have a creative take on the tacit invitation to test-drive that surrounds all vendibles placed in publicly accessible areas of shops rather than bolted away in glass cabinets?

Our hands-on but cash-off shopping expeditions could also be framed as a slapstick riposte to modern marketing. For some years now, merchants have forced aggressive symbols of potential commerce into my life in the form of advertising. I have no plan to ever buy a nasally delivered erection spray yet am constantly reminded — via print, radio and towering billboard promos — that such purchases are possible.

Is it really any different, therefore, when Alice and I flirt with merchandise with no intention of following through with a monetary exchange?

When we tease retailers by flaunting our potential buyerhood, is it really any more intrusive or inappropriate than their uninvited ad campaigns?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions but am hoping Alice will assist once she overtakes me intellectually and begins programming my VCR, defragging my computer and blaming all her adult problems on too much shopping centre and too few wooden blocks in her childhood.