Confidence is one of those things that every parent wants to build in their child and almost no one knows quite how to build intentionally. It’s easy to recognize when it’s missing — in the child who won’t try the new thing, who dissolves at the first failure, who needs three rounds of reassurance before … Read more
A toddler and a jigsaw puzzle. Or a toddler and a zipper. Or a toddler and the cup that was supposed to be the blue one. Or a toddler and the snack that broke in half, or the block tower that won’t stay up, or the television that turned off when the episode wasn’t finished, … Read more
You are in the meltdown right now. Or you’ve just been in one and you’re trying to understand what happened. Or you’re anticipating the next one — which, statistically, is coming — and you’d like to go into it with something more useful than the combination of patience and improvisation that has been getting you … Read more
The meltdown in the grocery store parking lot. The one over the broken cracker at 10:47am. The one at the end of a birthday party that was, until four minutes ago, going beautifully. The one at bedtime that turns a twenty-minute routine into a fifty-minute ordeal. Most parents spend a significant amount of their emotional … Read more
The pressure most parents put on their children is not intended as pressure. It arrives as interest — in grades, in activities, in effort, in what comes next. It arrives as the particular energy that enters a household during report card season, or during tryouts, or in the weeks before a performance. It arrives in … Read more
It is 11:23 on a Tuesday morning and your two-year-old is on the kitchen floor. The immediate cause — as best as you can reconstruct it — is that you cut the toast into rectangles instead of triangles. Or gave the blue cup instead of the red one. Or said it was time to leave … Read more
There is a version of misbehavior that is exactly what it looks like: a child who knows the rule, is choosing not to follow it, and is watching to see what happens next. This version is real, and it has its own research and its own set of responses. But there is another version — … Read more
Something happens. The behavior arrives — the explosion, the shutdown, the cutting word, the refusal, the aggression that seems to come from nowhere — and from the outside it looks like defiance, willfulness, or a simple choice to push against limits. The situation that triggered it doesn’t seem serious enough to warrant what followed. The … Read more
Most parents who yell don’t want to. That’s the part that makes it so difficult. It isn’t a deliberate strategy — it’s what happens after the patient version of the request has been ignored, after the calm version has been ignored, after the firmer version has been ignored, after the thing that was going to … Read more
The word “discipline” comes from the Latin disciplina — to teach, to instruct, to guide. For most of human parenting history, and in most family homes today, it has come to mean something considerably narrower: the application of consequences to behavior you want to stop. The removal of privileges. The time-out. The withdrawal of something … Read more
