community that once provided the emotional resources to weather the challenges of child rearing. Instead we are immersed in a culture that emphasizes individuality, competition, and self-centeredness.

One of the many reasons that it’s important to have dinner with your child most nights of the week is that this is a great time to discuss issues. Research shows that parents who encourage their kids to think about how people feel in different situations help kids become more empathic and more moral.

Keep at least the television and the cell phone, if not all electronics, out of the bedroom.

Our bar should focus primarily on effort and improvement, not performance. Kids’ capacities differ, and they change across time and across subjects. If you keep the effort bar high then good school choices make themselves reasonably clear. For one student that might be Princeton, and for another it might be a community college. Both of these

But David Elkind, the godfather (well, actually the maven) of healthy child development, says that children of this age should, at most, have three extracurricular activities—one social (Scouting, church or synagogue youth program), one physical (Little League, dance), and one artistic (piano lessons, drawing).

Entitled children are the inevitable outcome of time and resources that are wildly and disproportionately assigned to the children and not the adults in the family.

Children will be most successful when they decide which interests and talents to pour their hearts into. This is the work of growing up, to choose a life’s work

one in five American children and teens shows symptoms of a mental disorder and one in ten suffers from “mental illness severe enough to result in significant functional impairment.”

We should encourage our children to try a range of different activities; we should stress effort and encourage persistence when the going gets tough. Part of feeling successful at something is being good at it and most of being good at something has to do with effort and persistence.