For a very long time, people have been saying to me, "What if you want to do this approach with every kid?" For a behaviorally challenging kid, you're parenting this way just to help bring the kid's behavior under control and to greatly reduce conflict. But you want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one's behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another's perspective, honesty.

A lot of parents aren't exactly sure how to go about solving a problem with a kid in a way that's mutually satisfactory - doing that with their child feels very foreign to a lot of people. It probably explains why so many parents tell me their kids don't listen to them and why so many kids tell me that they don't feel heard.

Be your kid's collaborative partner, but also be a collaborative partner with the folks at school. Schools can be pretty unilateral too. Show them you know how to collaborate. Show them this is not about power. Let them know detentions and suspensions and paddling don't solve the problems that are affecting kids' lives. Those problems can be identified and solved but not by being punitive.

Kids are overprogrammed these days.

It's so crucial to really get a good handle on what's getting in the way of the kid completing a homework assignment. It can be so many things.

Everybody is talking about the behavior. Behaviors float downstream to us. We need to paddle upstream. The problems that are causing the behaviors, that's what's waiting for us. It's a crucial paradigm shift.

If we're sitting at dinner and there's no conversation going on because everybody's got their head someplace else in their iPhone, that's a family problem that needs to be solved.