Geoff the Duck and Guest 999,

Yes, we always run into problems when we try to treat children as numbers rather than statistics. I remember a statistician tears ago told me a "story" which demonstrates this quite well:

A group of scientists took a frog and made a loud noise behind it. They measured how far it jumped. They removed one of its legs, made that noise again and measured how far it jumped. They lft it with no legs and made the noise. It didn't move. From their ststistics they concluded that if you remove a frog's legs it goes deaf.....