No kid should be getting three or four hours of homework a night. There's no breathing time, there's no family time, there are just extracurriculars and homework and then go to bed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.