Why do so many parenting books come to such opposing conclusions? I am convinced it is because most don't have a robust-enough scientific filter. Just try to find a consensus from parenting experts about how to get your baby to sleep through the night. I can't imagine anything more frustrating...

Let's say little Aaron has been punished for a moral infraction -- stealing a pencil from classmate Jimmy -- just before a test. The punishment was subtractive in nature -- Aaron would have no dessert that night. But Aaron was not just punished and left alone.

He was also...

I remember meeting up with an old friend who had just become a mother. Baby in tow, we entered a restaurant. She immediately insisted on sitting at a private booth, and after five minutes, I discovered why. Mom knew that her baby would soon be hungry. When he was, she...

Kids are bad at lying, at least at first. In the magical fairy dust of the childhood mind, kids initially have a hard time distinguishing reality from fancy, which you can see in their eagerness to engage in imaginative play.

They also perceive their parents to be essentially omniscient,...

At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up all over your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing that babies weren't thinking about anything at all. Scientists coined the term "tabula rasa" -- blank slate -- to...

For the longest time, we couldn't figure out the words coming from our nine-month-old son Josh.

Whenever he took a car ride, he would start saying the word "dah," repeating it over and over again as we strapped him into his car seat, "Dah dah dah, goo, dah dah,...

The issue of kids' exposure to TV doesn't throw off as many sparks as it used to. There is general agreement that a child's exposure to television of any type should be limited. There is also general agreement that we are completely ignoring this advice. I remember as a kid...

A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of a giant, freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. It's not a kitchen table -- it's Walter Mischel's Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly.

"You see this cookie?" Mischel says. "You can eat it right...

Does your child give up easily? It could be because of a common parenting mistake.

Ethan's parents constantly told him how brainy he was. The wiry son of a highly educated professor in Seattle, Ethan was indeed smart. Every time he sailed through a test, his parents would say, "You're...

Parents need facts, not just advice, about raising their children. Too bad those facts are difficult to find in the ever-growing mountain of parenting books. And blogs. And message boards, and podcasts, and mothers-in-law, and every relative who's ever had a child. There's plenty of information out there. It's just...