Parenting & Behaviour

'How was school?' 'Fine.' The question is the problem — it is too big to answer. Here are twenty-five that are not.

Childhood anxiety rarely announces itself as worry. It shows up as stomach aches, bad behaviour, clinginess and refusal — which is why it is so often missed.

The call from school is easy to take badly. Handled well, it is the most useful information you will get about your child that term.

Most Indian adults were smacked and most turned out fine, which is why the argument is so hard to win. Here is the evidence, and — more usefully — what to do instead when a child will not listen.

Manners are taught by modelling and repetition rather than by public correction — and expecting a three-year-old to greet a room full of relatives is expecting the wrong thing.

Most child sexual abuse in India is by someone the family knows and trusts. The protection that works is not fear of strangers — it is a child who knows the rules, and an adult who has made it safe to tell.

A four-year-old's view of themselves is assembled almost entirely from what the adults around them say. That is a heavy responsibility and a useful lever.

A child in a rage cannot listen, reason or apologise. Everything useful happens either before it or after it — and almost nothing during.

The instinct is to solve it. The more useful move is to slow it down and let them solve it, with you close enough to stop anyone getting hurt.

Making friends is a set of skills rather than a personality trait — and every one of them can be taught to a child who is struggling.

Children hear about it anyway — from the television, the group chat, the school bus. The question is whether they hear about it from you as well.

Indian children carry one of the heaviest academic loads in the world, and the cost shows up in anxiety, sleep loss and worse. Supporting a child's education and pressuring them are not the same thing.

Indian households are generous with criticism and stingy with praise, and then wonder why children lack confidence. The fix is not more compliments — it is different ones.

For your first child, a new baby is not a gift — it is a competitor arriving with no notice. Here is how to make the transition kinder, before and after.

Almost no family says it treats sons and daughters differently. Almost every family does, in ways so ordinary they are invisible. Here is where it hides, and what to change.

Siblings fight — that part is unavoidable and even useful. What decides the long-term relationship is how the adults handle it.

Making a child hug an uncle they do not want to hug teaches exactly the lesson that body-safety rules are trying to prevent.

Sharing and turn-taking are not the same thing, and only one of them is possible for a two-year-old. Teaching the right one saves everyone a great deal of shouting.

Three methods with similar names and different mechanisms. The one that works depends on whether the child needs a boundary or needs help calming down.

The first time it happens it is usually funny, and laughing is the one response guaranteed to produce it again.

Somebody's child is doing it. The response that actually changes things starts with believing the report.

The first time a best friend chooses someone else is a real grief, and the instinct to solve it — ring the other parent, tell them to find better friends — makes it worse.

Most difficult behaviour is developmental and passes. This page is about the minority that does not — and about not waiting three years to find out which it is.

Every parent has shouted at a child and hated themselves afterwards. Here is what is actually driving it, what to do in the ten seconds before it happens, and how to repair the damage when it already has.

Being hit by your own child is humiliating in front of relatives and frightening on your own. It is also common, it is a communication problem before it is a discipline problem, and it responds to a consistent response.

Lying is a developmental milestone before it is a moral problem — and the way adults respond decides whether it fades or becomes a habit.