According to Fraser Mustard, a "child development expert" at York University and one of the report's authors, most of us are not very good at being parents. Almost 20 per cent of us, in fact, are "godawful" in that role, and an even larger percentage are bad influences on the "brain development" of our unfortunate spawn.

We have tried institutionalizing children before in experiments to socialize them better but they never worked very well. Can you say "residential schools?" Can you say "British public schools?" Can you say "sexual abuse, sadism and social dysfunction?"

The true child development experts are not social scientists who wouldn't recognize a real kid if he kicked them. Not even goodhearted, well-intentioned parents, well accustomed to being kicked as they may be, are true child-development experts. The real experts are the children themselves, who instinctively know where they should be -- with their mother, or even their father, but preferably both. They understand that, most of the time, even poor parents are better for kids than institutions. G.K. Chesterton, who was almost always right about human nature, once wrote that to say "my country, right or wrong" is like saying "my mother, drunk or sober," but in this case he got it wrong. "My mother, drunk or sober" is the cry of the institutionalized child, whether she is in day care or a residential school, because no child ever prayed for "my bureaucrat, right or wrong, my worker drunk or sober."