One of the silliest lines ever said in a feature film came from Love Story, the 1970s hit, which immortalized the phrase, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." There are few people who would actually want to share a life with someone who held that concept near and dear.

Our kids are not here to comfort us, to entertain us, or to validate us. Those things need to come from ourselves and from other adults.

No matter how children came to be living with just one parent, they need to be told, again and again, that your family's configuration is the result of an adult decision or an act of fate that has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children's requests, even when unreasonable.

We've all got to remember to pick our battles carefully, to be prepared to lose small ones, and to hold out for big ones.

One of the silliest lines ever said in a feature film came from Love Story, the 1970s hit, which immortalized the phrase, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." There are few people who would actually want to share a life with someone who held that concept near and dear.

Parents, whether or not we believe in a deity, know that to witness a child's mind searching for meaning is a miracle.