ArcaMax

Q: Our 8-year-old, the oldest of three, is often rude to his siblings. I know some sibling conflict is normal, but this seems excessive. I hear him multiple times per day tell his younger brothers how annoying they are. In addition, he often yells at them to stop whatever they are doing that he doesn’t like. We’ve asked him to stop berating ...Read more

Q: My husband and I have one child, age 2. We’d like to have at least one more. What is the optimal spacing between children?

A: Research puts ideal sibling spacing at three to four years. A child 3 or younger may respond to the birth of a sibling by regressing behaviorally and even becoming aggressive toward the new arrival. On the other ...Read more

Q: I’m a single mother with a 13-year-old son. His father, whom he sees infrequently, has PTSD from battle experiences. My son has anger toward his father, but I can’t get him to talk about it. It comes out of him in the form of a lot of disrespect directed toward me. What should I do about this?

A: I assume that by “this” you mean your...Read more

Q: In certain of your books as well as your newspaper column, you have written that children as young as 3 should be doing daily chores around the home. Exactly what chores are reasonable for that age child?

A: First, a personal anecdote: My mother kept a scrapbook of my early years that contained photos, notes and other such memorabilia. ...Read more

I grew up in the “You’re Making a Mountain of a Molehill” era, also known as the Age of “Children Are Starving in (fill in the blank with some remote place)," and by golly, I’m a better person for it!

First, some historical context: I am a baby boomer, a child of the '50s. I remember the first time I heard Elvis. I was in a diner with...Read more

Q: My best friend’s 6-year-old daughter is an only child and a spoiled brat. She screams at her parents when she doesn’t get her way, always wants to be first at everything and is extremely bossy with other children. For whatever strange reason, my children want to play with her. How can I discourage the friendship? Should I talk to my ...Read more

Q: We see my husband's 9-year-old son every other weekend and two weeks in the summer. He has major issues in school with both behavior and doing his work. He's well behaved when he's with us, but his mother lets him get away with a lot. Also, she thinks teachers should punish for school problems and she should punish for home problems (but she ...Read more

Q: Our sons are 6 and 4. When their same-age cousins come over, they all go down into our basement to play. Invariably, within 30 minutes, my youngest comes upstairs crying because his older brother is causing the cousins to gang up against him. I end up going down into the basement every half hour to settle these disputes. Is there a way to ...Read more

America entered what I call the Age of Parenting Enlightenment around 1970. That was the year, or thereabouts, when parents stopped listening to their elders about childrearing matters and began instead listening to people with capital letters after their names. The people in question were enlightened, supposedly, by having attended graduate ...Read more

A recent online article concerned a mom who refused to pay her teenage daughter for doing household chores. A poll of readers found that an overwhelming majority of them agreed with the daughter.

Paying a child for pulling her weight in the family when said child, being a minor, does not pay her share of the mortgage and utilities and is the ...Read more

Psychologist, author and professor Russell Barkley, widely regarded as one of America’s leading ADHD experts, used to be (and for all I know may still be) fond of ridiculing me in his public presentations, claiming that I believe television causes ADHD. Of course, I never said any such thing.

I maintained, and still do, that spending three ...Read more

If the following testimony from a thirty-eight-year veteran of the teacher wars was a one-off, it could be dismissed, but the sad, sad truth is it is but one of hundreds of such teacher testimonies I have obtained over the course of my career.

She reports: “I have often had a student, while in class, surreptitiously text a parent about a poor...Read more