At the foundation of your children’s financial intelligence should be this undeniable truth: It is not the amount of money you have but what you do with it that matters. This is true for a child managing a $5-a-week allowance or a corporate executive with a $5,000-a-week salary. For the better part of my life,…

OUR earliest and best recollections are associated with home. There the first lessons of infancy are learned. The mother’s heart is the child’s first school-room. The parents’ examples are first imitated by the child, whose earliest impressions are gained from them. In no way are evil habits more effectually propagated than by example, and therefore…

Today’s selections from my virtual mailbag come from mothers who on the one hand are facing completely different dilemmas, but on the other are exactly alike in that they want the very best for their children. Dear Mary: My biggest budget busters are enrichment activities for our four children. I want to spark their joy…

If you speak English in your home, your kids are not likely to come out speaking Italian. Kids learn through observation and imitation. And they don’t miss a thing. Children are shaped from the very beginning of life by the way their parents live. They are ever-attentive witnesses of grown-up behaviors. They take their cues…

By John Rosemond From Tribune News Service I grew up in the “You’re Making a Mountain of a Molehill” era, also known as the Age of “Children Are Starving in (fill in the blank with some remote place),” and by golly, I’m a better person for it! First, some historical context: I am a baby…

The most amazing story I’ve heard in years is told by H.D. Miller in “The Abernathy Boys Go for a Ride.” In 1910 when Bud Abernathy, age 10, and his brother Temple, age 6, saddled up their horses and rode without adult supervision from Oklahoma to New York City to see their hero, former president…

A couple of years ago, some friends and I were discussing the lottery. “When people ask me if I ever buy tickets, I tell them I already won the lottery,” one man said. “I was born in the middle of the 20th century in the United States of America.” Roughly 70 years after that mid-20th century childhood…

“Parents who are afraid to put their foot down usually have children who step on their toes.” This Chinese proverb has a lot to say about establishing and enforcing effective boundaries for kids to become successful adults. Rather than trying to correct an attitude of entitlement when kids are going into adolescence, childhood development research…

The distance from home that kids are allowed to roam and play has shrunk significantly over the past 50 years. That’s largely due to parents’ concerns over safety, especially in cities. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has further restricted children’s independent activity. As a doctorate student in psychology, I studied factors that affect people’s spatial…