Your home needs to be a place where your kids can fail—and learn from their failure. Surround them with love, show them how important they are to you, but don’t try to undo their failures. It’s not our job as parents to get our kids off the hook.

How parents interact with each child as he or she enters the family circle determines in great part that child's final destiny.

Love is a cognitive, willful act. Feelings have very little to do with it, particularly around three o'clock in the morning when the baby needs changing or somebody has "lost it" before getting to the bathroom to throw up.

Most arguments with teenagers are setups. Your darling, simply stated, is manipulating you.

That's the way it is with firstborns. Mom and Dad may think they're in charge, but the firstborn knows better, and so does the youngest sibling.

The older your teenagers are, the more they will have their own ideas and opinions. If you take them seriously, rather than assuming your ideas are always best and the only ones, you will begin to grow a relationship that will extend beyond the hormone-group years.

The only way we can ever teach a child to say "I'm sorry" is for him to hear it from our lips first.