A kindergarten teacher in Texas asks a six-year-old girl to put her toys away, and she launches into full tantrum mode, screaming and knocking over her chair, then crawling under the teacher's desk and kicking so hard the drawers spill out. Her outbursts marks an epidemic of such incidents of wildness among kindergartners, all documented in a single school district in Fort Worth, Texas. The blow-ups occurred not just among the poorer students but among better-off ones as well. Some explain the spike in violence among the very young as due to economic stress that makes parents work longer, so that children spend hours after school in day care or alone and parents come home with a hair trigger for exasperation. Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day -- hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age two not watch TV at all and that older children watch no more than two hours a day. The report on television and toddlers was presented by Laura Certain at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting, Baltimore, April 13, 2003.

Excerpted from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (London: Arrow Books, 2007) by Daniel Goleman, Ph.D.

I must have been dreaming
It was of bonfire and warmth and
Blissful dances
Then the cold woke me up and
In the dark I see
It was only a mist
Only a mist
And I shiver

Wanted to belong here
But something felt so wrong here
So I'd pray I could breakaway

Make a wish
Take a chance
Make a change

I'll spread my wings
And I'll learn how to fly
Though it's not easy to tell you goodbye

Take a risk
Take a chance
Make a change

And breakaway
Breakaway
Breakaway

Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway