You're your kid's partner, not the person who's pulling all the strings.

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

Challenging behavior is just a signal, the fever, the means by which the kid is communicating that he or she is having difficulty meeting an expectation.

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.

My advice to educators is collaborate with parents; they know a lot about their kids.

The vast majority of things parents and kids get in conflict over are highly predictable. We're disagreeing about the same expectations the kid is having difficulty meeting every hour, every day, every week. Because it's predictable, we can have these conversations proactively. That is very hard for people.

The idea that we can take this lump of clay and mold it into a form of our choosing is absolutely ludicrous.