When I told my wife I was writing a story about an illustrious child psychologist, she said, half-jokingly, “See if you can pick up anything useful.” We both knew what she meant: anything that might prove useful in handling our daughter, a four-year-old spitfire whose virtuosity on the monkey bars and heroic self-reliance are matched only by her gift for busting our chops.

Timeouts are a disciplinary tool that is widely misunderstood and frequently misused. Everyone has heard of timeouts, and they seem simple to use. Your child does something wrong, you send her to sit by herself for some set period of time. But, perhaps surprisingly, this is all many parents know about timeouts.

There's plenty of evidence that spanking, paddling or hitting children doesn't improve their behavior in the long run and actually makes it worse. But the science never trumps emotion, according to Alan Kazdin, head of the Yale Parenting Center and author of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

Most parents I know suffer from occasional — or constant — eruptions of parental self-judgment: moments when they feel they fall short of being the parents they could be. There's a gap between what they know about effective parenting (in the abstract) and what actually happens in everyday practice — in the car, in the supermarket, in the living room.

or even the most seasoned parents, everyday responsibilities like enforcing bedtimes, establishing good eating habits and managing sibling infighting can feel overwhelming. We discuss strategies for using positive reinforcement to deal with a range of ordinary parenting challenges throughout a kid’s life — from toddler to teenager — with Dr. Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center and author of the new book, “The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.”

Many routine but important medical services today are far more convenient to obtain than they were a generation ago. So how could these types of conveniences transfer to mental health services?

Research Suggests Which Strategies Really Get Children to Behave; How Timeouts Can Work Better

Every parent trying to come to grips with the scope of the tragedy in Connecticut is wondering how to talk to their kids about it.

Alan E. Kazdin, a nationally known psychologist for his work in child development and alumnus of San Jose State will give a lecture on parenting defiant children by using his method, the “Kazdin Method^Ⓒ,” which encourages using positive reinforcement for good behavior rather than punishment for a child.

Search for parenting books on Amazon.com, and you get tens of thousands of titles, leaving new parents awash in a sea of often conflicting information. But thanks to the accumulated results of decades of empirical research, psychologists know more than ever before about what successful parenting really is.