ArcaMax

A few thoughts over morning coffee…

From the Feedback Department: Certain recent columns of mine have drawn a spike in reader responses, both pro and con. My comments on the fact that young teachers are and have been for quite some time ill-prepared to deal with the realities of classroom discipline prompted a former professor of education to...Read more

Question: I am reading your book “The Well-Behaved Child” and have a question that it doesn’t address. I am a single mom with children from two different fathers. One of my ex-husbands (my son’s father) and I have arranged to do regular “child-exchanges.” One weekend, all the kids go to his house and on another weekend, they ...Read more

As another school year begins, one of many pertinent questions is “Has the per child or per-teacher (it doesn’t matter) rate of verbal and emotional abuse by teachers on students increased dramatically over the past fifty years or is it that the definition of such abuse has been dumbed down?”

The answer is yes.

As to the former, today’...Read more

It has long been known, but only spoken of in hushed tones by university professors sitting in darkened rooms wearing Fat Elvis masks, that pre-Kindergarten “jump-start” (aka, “push-down”) programs don’t work other than to increase teacher employment and give parents the false idea that their kids are on the fast track to certain ...Read more

An early childhood educator of thirty-eight years standing left a message asking if I had advice for encouraging cooperation from parents. She reports what every veteran teacher (defined as having twenty years or more classroom experience) I have spoken with over the past forty years reports: to wit, that it is the rare parent who does not ...Read more

“Potty training is a nightmare.” So begins advice from Meghan Leahy, advice columnist for The Washington Post. More accurately, potty training has, of late, BECOME a nightmare, thanks to advice of the sort Ms. Leahy dishes. Her approach? Do nothing. The child will eventually use the potty on his own. That may be true, but what Leahy fails to...Read more

Question: I am stepfather to my wife’s only child, age 8, from her first marriage. My wife always and in every way puts her son before our marriage. We went through counseling several years ago and things got better for a while, but then began slipping back into child-comes-first mode. Believe me, we have a near-perfect marriage ...Read more

When Baby Boomers get together we often talk about our observations of parenting in these postmodern times, one of which is that today’s parents seem, as a rule, to want to be liked by their children, to want to be their children’s friends. That, we agree, is very odd. What is lacking in the life of an adult that they want to be liked by a ...Read more

Most of the stuff today's parents worry about - and let's face facts...the worrier in question, the worrier supreme, is almost always the mother (not because of some weakness, but simply because she consumes parenting media that, as a rule, generate lots of worry) - is not worth the emotional energy. Left alone, it will "come out in the wash," ...Read more

I call it “psychological thinking,” referring to the tendency among parents of the last fifty years or so to attribute bad behavior on the part of a child to so-called “issues” that are thought to be causing emotional tensions of one sort or another. That is, in fact, precisely what my graduate school professors taught; to wit, that ...Read more

Strolling through my go-to grocery store the other day, I happened down the Baby Products aisle where I spied packages of toilet-training pants featuring pictures of happy children who looked at least three, some as old as five. The first question that came to mind: Why would a five-year-old who is continuing to eliminate on himself be happy? ...Read more

Question: We have a boy, 6, and a girl, 9, who fight constantly about everything under the sun. My husband and I have a good marriage. We hardly ever have a serious disagreement about anything, so it’s hard for us to understand what has led to our kids’ inability to get along. In any case, their fighting has become very draining, ...Read more

A column of mine that originally appeared in January of 2017 has been circulating on the Internet ever since, accumulating over a million hits to date. In a nutshell, its message is simply that parents, not children, are the most important people in a family and the husband-wife relationship should greatly “trump” that between either parent ...Read more

Question: Our 15-year-old daughter has told us she’s in love with a 20-year-old guy who is in the Army and intending to make the Army his career. We’ve met him, and he is extremely respectful and well-mannered, and has told us he’s in love with her. We’ve made it clear to both of them that for the time being at least, they may ...Read more

Rates of child and teen depression and suicide continue to rise, as they have for fifty years. As regular readers of this column know, I do not agree in the least with current explanations, much less the “treatments” based on them, proposed by the mainstream in the mental health professions. For the past year, on my weekly radio program (...Read more

Question: I am a grandmother with custody of my two grandsons, six-year-old twins. Because of behavior problems at home and school and difficulties relating to other children (they play and communicate with one another just fine), they have been diagnosed with autism. What is your opinion of the diagnosis and what can I do to help them? ...Read more