People still look askance at a kid in the supermarket who's pitching a fit and think the parent is not sufficiently in control or not being sufficiently punitive. That's an issue for a lot of parents as well.

People still look askance at a kid in the supermarket who's pitching a fit and think the parent is not sufficiently in control or not being sufficiently punitive. That's an issue for a lot of parents as well.

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.

When there's a good fit between skills and expectations, there's what we call compatibility, and we would expect a good outcome. When there's a poor fit between expectations and the capacity of the kid, there is incompatibility, and that's when we see people exhibit challenging behavior.

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.

Most parents are accustomed to dealing with problems in the heat of the moment.

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.