We never get to see that our kid is capable of solving problems on her own. We never start to build up the faith that they can actually do it.

Parents are much more likely to be attuned to what they don't like than they are to the expectations that the kid is having difficulty meeting.

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.

We never get to see that our kid is capable of solving problems on her own. We never start to build up the faith that they can actually do it.

If a solution isn't mutually satisfactory, it's not going to stick.

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.

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.