"By scrutinizing twenty-one years of data collected for 1,265 New Zealanders born in 1977, a team of sociologists from Christchurch School of Medicine were able to tease out the various social circumstances that predispose young people toward crime. Their analysis especially highlights the importance of  "family adversity."  In particular, when the researchers used statistical models that took "family factors" into account, they "reduced the C[rime] I[ncidence]R[ate]R[atio] ... substantially."  The New Zealand scholars thus stress "the major role of family factors" in mediating the relationship between poverty and crime. 

The researchers' conceptual definition of "family adversity" comprises a number of things, including "reduced levels of maternal care; changes in parental figures [such as those caused by divorce and remarriage]; [and] low attachment to parents."  All of these adverse family characteristics appear implicated in the incubation of criminal tendencies." 

"Dan McCauley had seen one too many kids at his cafe lying on the floor in front of the counter, careening off the glass pastry case, coming perilously close to getting their fingers pinched in the front door. So he posted a sign: 'Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices.'

...That one little notice, adorned with pastel hand prints, has become a lightning rod in a larger debate over parenting and misbehaving children.

'It's not about the kids,' says McCauley, the 44-year-old owner of A Taste of Heaven cafe, who has no children but claims to like them a lot. 'It's about the parents who are with them. Are they supervising and guiding them?

I'm just asking that they are considerate to people around them.'"

Progressive thinkers are always pressing to get children into non-maternal care at earlier and earlier ages. Five-year-olds, after all, need to prepare for first grade by going to kindergarten. Three- and four-year-olds need to get a leg up on the kindergarten curriculum by attending preschool. One- and two-year-olds need an early start on socializing by spending their days in day care.  And so it goes, in a regression that pulls children out of the home at ever-earlier ages.  That young children are actually round pegs in the square holes that educationists keep creating in this out-of-home bureaucracy seems almost unthinkable. But a study recently completed by researchers at the Yale Child Study Center makes the misfit between young children's needs and preschool programs' offerings all too clear.

Drawing data from randomly selected 4815 classrooms in the 52 state-funded pre-kindergarten programs in the 40 states that have such programs, the researchers uncovered a very disturbing pattern: pre-kindergarten students are expelled from their programs at rates more than three times as high as those for students attending kindergarten through twelfth-grade classes.

"No one wants to hear about three- and four-year-olds being expelled from preschool," acknowledged Walter S. Gilliam, the lead Child Study Center researcher. "But it happens rather frequently."

The pre-kindergarten expulsion rate ran one-and-a-half times higher among four-year-olds than among three-year-olds and more than four-and-a-half times higher among young boys than among young girls. But the overall pattern of high expulsion rates for pre-kindergarten students is indisputable: the overall margin of error for the data sampling was less than two percent.

Some readers of the new study may wonder if the young children getting expelled from their pre-school programs are not actually the smart ones: perhaps they have, after all, figured out what they must do to get back home with their mothers - where they belong in the first place.