Q. My 13-year-old is constantly complaining about things at school. She complains about who is getting away with what, that the teacher is targeting and being mean to her, and that another long-time friend is talking behind her back. She had me ready to barge into school and take down the teachers, administration, and the mean group of girls. Then I checked in with a friend whose son is in the same class and she had a different perspective from a different point of view (her son’s) which made me reevaluate everything that my daughter was telling me. My question is how do you deal with your child’s drama without getting sucked in?
A. Kids love drama! For kids, whipping up a little bit of drama is great practice for negotiating systems and navigating relationships. They use different kinds of language to practice their impact and to strategically figure out how to get what they want. When we are young, we all practice our dramatic skills of provocativeness to see how our responses might impact another. This can be great Read more…
Q. As I navigate my way through the influence of technology my fears are around knowing that I have a certain amount of control right now while my kids are 5 and 7, but what about later? I’ve taken the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, committing to not giving my kids phones until at least 8th grade. And even then, I would lean toward “dumb” phones. But perhaps what scares me most is how being on social media will affect them when they reach that stage. It’s something I never had to experience myself. The bullying, anxiety, eating disorders, and everything else that stems from the weight of that world frightens me. And what I hear from others and read in 
xplaining why it’s not okay and that it’s not okay to use in our house, nothing seems to work he just lays around and says: penis, boobies, vagina and others – no swear words but typical toilet talk. He will poke me or others and say I can see your booby, bum bum etc. also with his 1 year old sister and dogs etc. One older friend exacerbates this, and we notice that when they are together it is much worse but our almost 5 yo certainly says it too much. Any advice would be appreciated as it’s starting to be such a theme and hard to help him know that it’s not okay to yell this and say it all the time.
A Connective Parent asked about how toddlers learn self-control. Every parent needs real-life solutions to tantrums.
Q. My eight-year-old daughter has taken to lying and I don’t know what to do. The other day I was driving her home from a friend’s house. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her playing with legos that were not hers. Her friend has quite a collection. I asked her where she got them, and she told me that a friend at school had given them to her. I said that we had not brought them to her friend’s. She said she had put them in the car earlier to play with on the way home. Her brother told me later that she had taken them from her friend’s house. What is my next step?
Q. I have two daughters, 12 and 10. We have a wonderful, respectful, open relationship. The older is very much an introvert, like me and my husband. She works hard academically, achieves well, and has a mind that races along a million miles per hour. She is always up to something constructive, is very comfortable in her own company. 
It’s Okay to Let Kids Quit Things
Q. My husband and I see the world—and parenting—differently. He is a type B personality (always looking for his keys), and my son and I are type A personalities (we never misplace anything because there’s a place or “home” for everything and everything in its place. How do we raise our son with two different and most times opposing parenting styles? Do we go by Mom’s style when Dad’s at work and Dad’s way when Mom’s at work. I figure that our son is learning to be flexible and learning that different rules apply at different homes or with different people. My husband, on the other hand, thinks we’re confusing him. He and my son seem to butt heads more often than our son and I do. When this happens, my husband thinks we are ganging up on him. 