I recall that as a child I saw a movie in which a dead body fell out of a closet. For a long time after that I made sure that there was nothing in our closet before I went to bed. Even so, I would still wake up frightened of what might come out of that closet. Such fears are common in childhood and have many different causes, but seeing something scary at a movie or on TV is a frequent starting point for such anxieties.

In their 1981/1991 book entitled Getting to Yes, Fisher, Ury, and Patten (Fisher 1981/1991) describe a number of negotiating strategies that can be used in many different situations. Although the book was written for adult negotiators, I believe many of the principles outlined in that book can work just as well for negotiations between parents and children.

A number of years ago, Israeli psychologist Haim Ginott published a book entitled Between Parent and Child.(Ginott 2003) He became a popular figure on talk shows and his book was a best seller. His students, Adele Faber and Elaine Maizlish followed up with even more successful best seller How to talk so your Kids will listen and How to listen so Your Kids Will Talk.(Faber 1999) I was reminded of these books when I was at the pier in Hyannis on Cape Cod.

Maria Montessori believed that there are no bad children, just bad upbringing or education. This blog was prompted by the e-mail which I recently received and which is posted below. Embedded in this grandmother’s question is a deeper one, namely, are some children evil by nature, the so-called bad seed?

A couple of weeks ago I was playing the board game Operation with my eight-year-old granddaughter who was visiting us at the Cape. The game involves trying to remove—with tweezers-- tiny cardboard body parts out of their location in a cardboard cut out of the human torso. If you touch any part of the torso with the tweezers it sets off a buzzer to tell you have lost that move. I was intent on removing a kidney when my tweezers hit the torso and the buzzer went off.