Living in New York it goes without saying that our daughter began in pre-school when she was nine months old.

Such premature education is as essential a part of New York as eating strawberries is at Wimbledon, or being shoved off the sidewalk by crowds of sneaker-shod American teenagers is in Florence.

Since everyone else was doing it we reckoned we’d better do it too; it was, if nothing else, as good a way as any to get hooked into the Mommy network, which is so vital to parental survival and sanity in the harsh unforgiving environment of the Big Apple.

This is not just some glorified child-care, I hasten to add, but neither is it one of those fancy super-expensive upper east-side nursery schools where the mothers show up in Chanel and they tell you when you tour—surrounded by other potential parents so uptight that every orifice in their body appears to be sewn tight shut— how most of the children who’ve been there end up at Harvard or Yale; as if what they did with the four year olds made a difference. Our school was a small parent co-operative housed in a subsidized development for people in the performing arts. It specialized in feeding kids into the better public schools, and we definitely counted as some of the more “corporate” parents.

At the end of our daughter’s last year at that friendly little school a brouhaha hit it that reminded us that we lived at the epicenter of lunatic parental indulgence both of their children and themselves.

For the last few weeks of the session the parents of the oldest and physically biggest boy in the class, a six-year-old who for the sake of anonymity we’ll call Zachary, conducted a constant assault of moaning and bitching because, they claimed, their darling son was being bullied and victimized by the other boys in the class. Now when I tell you that there were 20 children in the class and that they were overseen by 5 adults, you will, unless you’re as big a nut as the parents concerned, almost immediately reach the conclusion that the opportunities for systematic persecution were limited. And when you consider that Zachary was nearly six and his supposed persecutors just five, that no-one had ever seen anything other than the normal interaction to be expected between children of their age, and that the complaints were based purely on stories taken home by the child and no doubt extracted by the neurotic mother on pain of withdrawal of some tasty soy-based treat or other, you might think that the school authorities would have taken appropriate calming measures and moved on.

But Zachary’s mother was a small, wizened, beady-eyed and ineluctable force of nature of a type well-known to New Yorkers but scarcely ever encountered elsewhere. The school must, she demanded, issue formal warnings to the 4 and 5 year-old miscreants who were so cruelly scarring the psyche of her darling boy, and if the warnings were ignored, they must be cast out from the bosom of the nursery – in short, they must be expelled! The school authorities didn’t think too much of that, but the parents of the supposed malefactors nevertheless found themselves reprimanding their children daily for sins that they had not committed, or which were so minor that at their age they had no chance of knowing if they were committing them or not. Then Zachary’s father smeared a thick layer of poison icing on top of the cup cake by making irate telephone calls to them, vaguely threatening violence to their children if they persisted in their systematic persecution of his son.

There’s no doubt that this problem was mainly in the mind of the idiot parents and, the more they encouraged him, also in the mind of their son. Zach was actually a charming kid, and when he was at school he played and interacted quite normally with the other children. When he reached home, however, he apparently described his day as a terrifying voyage of mental and physical intimidation and brutality.

The lunacy, thank heaven, only reached fever pitch in the final few weeks of the school year – although it certainly managed to cast a blight over those, and to take the attention of the teachers away from every child but, of course, the saintly much-wronged Zach. He and his parents soon disappeared from our lives for ever, and we can console ourselves with the fact that they were able to do little harm as the classes that they disrupted were ones without which most of the world’s children survive entirely.

We do occasionally wonder, though, how Zach’s current fellow pupils and their parents are faring. Now that he’s in second grade his and their educations really matter; its disruption by one selfish, spoiled, neurotic family with an over-developed sense of entitlement and a vastly inflated opinion of their own wisdom will really hurt.

It isn’t just on the global scale that one self-centered jerk can ruin things for everyone.