Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.

So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.

Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.

Taking the child's point of view demands good will, time, and effort on the part of parents. The child is the clear beneficiary. Parents who make the effort to understand their children's point of view are likely to treat children fairly and in an age-appropriate manner.

Honesty remains the best policy. If parents use alcohol in moderation in front of young children, that provides the right model. Drug use is more complex because even moderate use can have unforeseen consequences.

The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.

Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotiona l development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.