I can't stop thinking about articles and an interview on the radio with the director general of education in Western Australia - Sharyn O'Neill - in which she has written and spoken about five year olds being violent in schools, one five year old having to be restrained by three teachers, and that the future success of four year olds lies in them having delayed gratification. She cites the marshmallow experiment as the proof of this. And then I think about Steve Biddulph writing about the importance of boys and girls and wrestling with adults. He writes that if children are wrestled with and then they get rough, the adult calls an immediate halt to the wrestling and teaches the child that 'we don't get rough', they learn to have self control through the modelling of the adult. My thoughts are that these little ones don't have the verbal skills to let people know what it is that is troubling them and so they use other means. How can a group of five year olds 'socialise' each other? They need to be 'filtered' into the world through their aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and significant other adults who gently and carefully tolerate them and guide them. Again it is interesting what Steve Biddulph says about compulsory schooling for young children.

And of course Ken Robinson's take on 'difficult' children.