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This is the second in a three-part series on unschooling. Read the first installment in the series here

I can’t remember the last time I came home smelling like smoke. Or the last time I worried about my kids breathing in a bunch of smoke. Most of our friends and relatives who smoke hold off around the kids, and with the new city and county smoking bans, it’s going to be rare indeed for the kids to even see people smoking across the room.

So I wonder … will they be less likely to try it themselves? Or will they be more likely because it’s something exotic? Will it be like immunizations — parents who’ve never experienced a child sick with measles or whooping cough are forgoing vaccines against those diseases, and now the rates are on the rise.  Maybe my kids, never having seen a smoker puffing away despite a hacking cough, will be oblivious to the dangers.

Well, I finally did it. I went out and bought myself a minivan.

While my son was in the midst of a nasty stomach-and-respiratory virus the week before last, we left the doctor’s office empty-handed except for this piece of advice: Keep him hydrated.

Naturally, 7-year-olds with a fever, cough and queasy stomach are not inclined to go along with anything adults say, and my son’s immediate reaction was to say he wasn’t thirsty. OK, I thought. We’ll see. But when round after round of coughing racked his little body, I finally hit upon the idea of a drinking game.

Potty training stands out as one of those parenting duties that comes with more questions than answers: When? How? What’s normal? When should I worry? What if it's just not happening?
 
Dr. John Gleeson, a pediatrician with Esse Health’s O’Fallon Pediatrics, talked with SmartParenting about the potty training process. We learned so much we've renamed Dr. Gleeson "The Potty Whisperer." See if you agree.
 

I repeat myself a million times a day. Or so it seems — like all kids, mine have selective hearing. They always hear “Candy” but never “Can you please …” However, in some cases, it may not be the child’s fault — one in 20 kids ages 6 to 12 has hearing loss in one ear, according to a 2010 study from the Washington University School of Medicine.

Often these hearing deficits go undetected — parents may be worried about a child’s ability to pay attention, for example, when in fact the child isn’t hearing directions well.

Back in my advertising days, the company I worked for forced us to take the Myers-Briggs personality test.

When the results were tallied, we were instructed on how to use the information to communicate more efficiently with one another. The extroverts were basically taught how to handle us introverts with kid gloves. The introverts, on the other hand, were provided with zero instruction on how to deal with extroverts – which pretty much told us that as introspective folks we were weird freaks of nature that needed to be put in a cage and studied by our louder counterparts.