Dr Laura,

I agree with the tone of your advice about raising children. I have two "old" kids now (24 and 27) and I wanted to add one thing that worked for us: reading to them daily before they went to bed.

My wife or I read to our kids every day when they were toddlers up until they left grade school, and this paid great dividends. It also provided a natural mechanism for discipline, because it helped us develop a strong emotional relationship with them that was rebuilt every night. We could have tough days battling our kids the way all parents do, but each night we would have to like each other enough to read. It also gave us a chance to respond to our kids as people rather than as parents: if the kids' behavior was really bad, we could say "I don't like you much right now and don't feel like reading to you." This simple mechanism seemed to be the key for solving discipline problems: build an emotional relationship that you can use to share the later to kindly enforce a personal kind of discipline.

So pick up the Trilogy books and start reading tonight.

Tim