THE challenge of bringing up a child is a tough one.

From the days when a baby suffers from colic to the first few tentative days at school and on to the tantrums of the teenage years, life can be fraught for parents and their offspring.

Now try and put yourself in the place of Pat Kelly, a 71-year-old who has to care for her 16-year-old grandson.

And imagine if the boy has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, and, as a result, is prone to temper tantrums and irrational behaviour.

You'd need all the support you could find, as we're certain readers will agree.

Then imagine how you'd feel if you thought your pleas for help were falling on deaf ears. Abandoned - and angry - we'd wager.

Those feelings should have no place in our society at the beginning of the 21st Century, particularly when social services departments have been set up specifically to help the most vulnerable members of our community.

In the case of Mrs Kelly and grandson Robert, it appears that there are some issues to be resolved between Worcestershire and Somerset county councils.

But why that should stand in the way of an offer of help to Mrs Kelly is baffling.

All she wants is for Robert to be taken out a couple of times a week and given the chance to make friends.

But she believes that social services, in her words, "don't want to know".

In recent years, the department has been under considerable pressure to keeps its spending down. But there comes a point at which reality has to take hold and money spent where it's needed.

In cases like Mrs Kelly's, it isn't good enough for social services to be so short of money that all it can say is that it will see if it can do anything to help "bearing in mind our very limited budget".