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.

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.

[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It didn't always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby.

Hard though it may be to accept, remember that guilt is sometimes a friendly internal voice reminding you that you're messing up.

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

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.

Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be careful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text.