Many parents wonder why their kids don’t seem to respond to their discipline techniques or anything else.  Watch what Michael Smalley has to say on why your kids don’t listen and what you can do about it.

Or… Whether ’tis nobler to be an invasive parent or trust your teenager?

That is the question.

The fastest growing segment of people on Facebook (FB) are those over thirty-five years old. A lot of them are parents.

It won’t be long before some very clever hacker will produce Facebook G2: ‘Where your mom can’t find you.’ Why? Because even in the Internet-cell phone- GPS age, a developing young adult wants his or her privacy. Is that so bad?

This question came to my attention when I first joined Facebook about a year ago. Being a newbie, I did everything Facebook instructed me to do, including invite everyone in my email address book to be my ‘friend’. That included my teenage son, M.

One day M. passed by me in the kitchen and we did a stop and chat. “Hey, you never accepted my invitation to be my friend on Facebook.” It isn’t often I see a deer caught in the headlights look in my son’s eyes. “Mom, no.” “What? Don’t you want to be my friend on Facebook?” The look in his eyes grew desperate, less deer and more torture victim, “Mom. Please. No.”

M. was on Facebook a year before I was. My son is a healthy typical American teenager, which is to say, his peers mean everything to him. I don’t expect to know, or approve, of every little thing he’s up to, but I do expect him to be responsible and, in the most important sense, he is. He didn’t exactly ask my permission to have a FB account but he didn’t hide it either.

via To Be or Not to Be My Kid’s Friend On Facebook | World of Psychology.

A great article on how to raise a smart kid! I think you’ll find this helpful.  If only my parents had known about this stuff when I was a kid!

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life…

read the rest here The Secret to Raising Smart Kids: Scientific American.

I thought it was interesting when I ran across this article, considering what I tweeted about yesterday:

via Psychology Today: Parent, Not Patsy.

Beth Flanders was on her way to China to adopt her 17-month-old daughter in September when she received a warning from her adoption agency: An industrial chemical that can cause kidney stones had been found in Chinese baby formula, and parents should not feed it to their new children.

Flanders’ daughter had no symptoms. But in November, an ultrasound revealed two kidney stones, which are unusual in children. Now the Los Angeles-area nurse wonders if melamine is to blame.

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Have we ever figured out what the consequences are to letting other people raise our children? I understand there are some couples who do not have a choice when it comes to putting their young kids into child care centers and programs, but I do want to make sure that every couple sits down and actually looks at the cost of daycare as compared to what they are making at their job. 

Too many times I’ve done this exercise with couples in my office when they find out it actually costs them more money each month to put their kids in daycare than it would to simply stay at home.  Just a thought.

It’s a question that faces most parents, but there’s no clear answer:

How do we know whom we can trust with our children?

A recent report by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies found that 63 percent of the nation’s children under 5 are in some type of child care arrangement every week. That includes day care centers, home-based centers, care by relatives and various combinations.

Illinois licenses child care workers, but how can parents compare such intangibles as caring, sincerity and warmth? What’s the next best thing to parents?

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