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.

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.

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

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.

People don't scream or swear or pout or sulk when there's compatibility. But most growth occurs when there's incompatibility. When it comes to resilience, when it comes to pulling yourself up when you've fallen down, you don't learn those things when things are going well. You learn those things when you're struggling.

Kids are overprogrammed these days.

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.