Posted today
A sixth-grade teacher recently shared the following story with me: Two girls in her class were making fun of a classmate whose family was struggling financially. The girl was socially awkward and...
Read MorePosted 1 week ago
Many times have I warned parents of the pitfalls of micromanaging their children’s academic responsibilities lest said children deduce that the responsibilities in question are not theirs at all...
Read MorePosted 2 weeks ago
To most folks, micromanagement has to do with tasks or performance. The micromanaging parent, for example, is generally thought of as one who hovers over a child’s homework or academics in...
Read MorePosted 3 weeks ago
Q: My three-year-old is prone to ear infections. When he has one, his behavior deteriorates considerably. He becomes disobedient and given to angry outbursts. When his ears are clear, he’s...
Read MorePosted 4 weeks ago
Q: My 5-year-old continues to throw tantrums when he doesn’t get his way. His father and I are divorced. I have primary custody. He is with his dad every other weekend, basically. My ex- has very...
Read MorePosted on 3/10/2021
Concerning my prior use of the word “addiction” in association with smart phones and children (including teens), some people think I am speaking figuratively. To set the record straight: No, I am...
Read MorePosted on 3/2/2021
What, pray tell, is COVID parenting? I need to know because over the past few months, several journalists have asked if I have any COVID-parenting suggestions. I went online and, sure enough, a...
Read MorePosted on 2/23/2021
A therapist takes a 10-year-old boy into what she calls “therapy.” The young fellow is belligerently defiant toward his parents and throws titanic tantrums when things don’t go his way. At school...
Read MorePosted on 2/16/2021
Researchers have found what many personal testimonies will confirm: most shy children, even the most painfully shy of them, are not shy adults. The progression from introversion to extroversion...
Read MorePosted on 2/9/2021
Misusing terminology is not simply a matter of semantics. A person who confuses the meaning of words is likely to behave accordingly. That occurred to me during a conversation with...
Read MorePosted on 2/2/2021
Q: In a recent column, you described our five-year-old daughter. She is in bed at 6:30 in the evening but usually wakes up during the night and wants to talk to us about whatever is on her mind....
Read MorePosted on 1/26/2021
A headache does not mean one has a brain tumor, but some brain tumors do cause headaches. Likewise, ADHD behaviors do not mean one has a food allergy, albeit some food allergies...
Read MorePosted on 1/19/2021
Making children happy became a parenting goal in the early 1970s. The paradox, as everyone with a modicum of commonsense knows, is that the more effort parents put into making a child happy, the...
Read MorePosted on 1/12/2021
2021 marks the forty-fifth year I’ve been writing this column. I’ve been told it is the longest-running syndicated column written continuously by one author. That takes “Dear Abby” out of...
Read MorePosted on 1/5/2021
Q: I teach 3- and 4-year-olds in a childcare center in Australia. I always have a few difficult children in any group and the book in which you describe Alpha Speech [The Well-Behaved Child] has...
Read MorePosted on 12/29/2020
Q: Our son is seven years old and in the second grade. His school went virtual this past Spring and we see no end to it, not in the near term at least. When he was going to a brick-and-mortar...
Read MorePosted on 12/22/2020
A journalist asks, “What is the biggest challenge facing today’s children?” “The real world,” I said. For the last fifty years or so, good parenting has been defined...
Read MorePosted on 12/14/2020
Q: Our 14-year-old daughter desperately wants to begin wearing makeup, which all, and I mean all, of her classmates are allowed to do. We have held off not only because of our beliefs but also...
Read MorePosted on 12/8/2020
“Hand in Hand” parenting is the latest iteration of progressive (nouveau, unverified) childrearing. I became aware of HIH several weeks ago, courtesy of a grandmother whose daughter and son-in-law...
Read MorePosted on 12/1/2020
“Are you afraid of your child/children?” I query folks who testify to children who frequently engage in flagrant antisocial behavior – tantrums, brazen disrespect, and belligerent disobedience...
Read MorePosted on 11/18/2020
Nearly every time I talk to an adoptive parent, I become saddened, disgusted, angry or each in turn. It recently happened again. The parent in question is the mother of a pre-teen...
Read MorePosted on 11/10/2020
Q: We sent our daughter a recent article of yours hoping it might cause her to rethink her approach to raising our grandson. It was not well-received and she is no longer speaking to us. The...
Read MorePosted on 11/4/2020
It’s funny, sort of, the things some parents want to believe. An example concerns children who’ve developed full-blown “eating disorders” by age three. “My child was exhibiting food...
Read MorePosted on 10/27/2020
Living with an emotionally dramatic child is no fun. They throw wet blankets over nearly every family gathering or outing. Little is right in their lives and attempts to cheer them up generally...
Read MorePosted on 10/20/2020
Q: In a recent column, you identified toddlerhood as “the hump of parenting.” As a grandmother who managed to raise five kids who were out of the house in their early twenties and are responsible...
Read MorePosted on 10/13/2020
Q: Our first child, a boy, just turned two. Per your advice, he is toilet trained and eating whatever I serve. Before he was born, we determined that we were not going to raise a picky eater. Our...
Read MorePosted on 10/6/2020
Q: In your column of last week, you referred to the “hump of toddlerhood.” Can you please explain further? A: In using the word “hump,” I’m equating chronological toddlerhood – roughly,...
Read MorePosted on 9/29/2020
Q: My husband and I are not on the same page when it comes to our just-turned four-year-old son. He thinks our son’s behavior is a phase that he will outgrow. To me, his defiance and tantrums are...
Read MorePosted on 9/20/2020
A mother in California seeks her pastor’s opinion on allowing her fifteen-year-old son to have a smartphone. The boy claims that if he can’t use social media, he will have no friends. Mom is...
Read MorePosted on 9/14/2020
Q: My 13-year-old son’s grades and overall respect for me and other adults – teachers, in particular – began going downhill last year (eighth grade), even before the shutdown. He began school this...
Read MorePosted on 9/8/2020
A grandmother in Arkansas says her adult children have great difficulty telling their children what to do. They turn instructions – more accurately, what they think are instructions – into...
Read MorePosted on 9/2/2020
As just about everyone who has lived with a child for more than two years knows, the most potentially dangerous thing one can say to a toddler is “no.” That single syllable strikes deep into the...
Read MorePosted on 8/25/2020
My profession, psychology, began demonizing traditional childrearing in the late 1960s. I was in graduate school at the time and on fire for the promise that the proper use of psychological...
Read MorePosted on 8/18/2020
Q: We have a five-year-old who obsesses about dying. This has been going on for six months, ever since a child in the neighborhood died of a congenital genetic condition. Our son knew the boy and...
Read MorePosted on 8/11/2020
Q: Our nine-year-old has just learned he is not going back to school on schedule in the fall. Instead, he will be doing distance learning by computer and home instruction. We had to do this for...
Read MorePosted on 8/4/2020
Q: Our 10-month-old son has recently discovered the joys of throwing finger food on the floor at mealtimes. He doesn’t seem to care if I feed it to him myself, one piece at a time, but isn't it...
Read MorePosted on 7/28/2020
I recently received a paean to my generation – the so-called “boomers” – that has been circulating on the Internet for some time now. It recalls and celebrates the freedom we enjoyed as children...
Read MorePosted on 7/21/2020
One of my books, “Making the ‘Terrible’ Twos Terrific!”, has recently become a best-seller in China, of all places. Seriously! What sorts of problems are Chinese parents having with their...
Read MorePosted on 7/14/2020
Q: When my two-year-old gets angry, he sometimes gets down and bangs his head on the floor. This happens two or three times a week, generally speaking. He’s not bruised himself, yet, but I don’t...
Read MorePosted on 7/7/2020
Are parents responsible for the sort of people their children become? That’s this week’s question, and the answer is no, albeit equivocally. Several parents have recently written me...
Read MorePosted on 6/30/2020
I have long maintained that the significant per-capita increase in child and adolescent mental health problems since the 1960s – a ten-fold increase in suicide, for example – is due to the...
Read MorePosted on 6/23/2020
Q: Our son, age 8, has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. His IQ is well above average but his actual performance in the classroom is problematic. He has difficulty paying attention...
Read MorePosted on 6/9/2020
“There’s no one-size-fits-all model of childrearing for all the world’s parents,” opines Alma Gottlieb, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Gottlieb was quoted in an...
Read MorePosted on 6/2/2020
In 1972, a Stanford University psychologist conducted a study in which young children, individually, were offered either a small but immediate reward (a marshmallow or a pretzel) or a doubled...
Read MorePosted on 5/26/2020
I have come up with a new psychological diagnosis, one that I won’t, however, be submitting for approval to the powers that be: simply, odd. My “odd” is to be distinguished from ODD, the acronym...
Read MorePosted on 5/19/2020
Psychologist B. F. Skinner, the formulator of behavior modification theory, was attempting to prove that the same principles that govern the behavior of amoeba, planaria, rats, dogs, and monkeys...
Read MorePosted on 5/12/2020
The biggest problem in the life of today’s all-too typical mother is herself. She is her own worst enemy. Them’s fightin’ words, I know, but please, hold the tomatoes and other vegetables and bear...
Read MorePosted on 5/5/2020
No rational person would argue that the smaller the class size, the better, right?” asked the radio talk show host. “I think I’m a rational person,” I said, “and I can offer proof...
Read MorePosted on 4/28/2020
In his November 1863 address at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the men who lost their lives on that battlefield had done so in order that “government of the people, by the people and...
Read MorePosted on 4/21/2020
Q: My three-year-old son tends to react physically when he's mad at a preschool classmate instead of talking it out and letting the teachers intervene. We have encouraged him to use words when...
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