Several themes have been repeated throughout this book. It might be a good idea to summarize these briefly.

1. Unintentional reinforcement of undesired behaviors. Crying at night, tantrums, head banging, breath holding, spitting out medication, refusing to brush their teeth and car seat tantrums, are all examples of this.

2. Discipline requires consistency. Consider physical exercise as a good means of punishment. Be consistent and don't bluff. Parents must provide a united consistent disciplinary approach, especially with adolescents.

3. Understanding human nature can reduce undesirable consequences. The consequences of our human nature must be understood to avoid catastrophic violence, accidents, drug abuse, etc.

4. Spend time together and communicate as a family, especially at dinner time. Fostering comfortable communication within the family promotes maintaining communication in the more difficult years of adolescence and beyond.

5. Our children need our presence. Our job as parents is to be there for our children to provide them (with our presence) guidance, knowledge, supervision, health maintenance, joy, etc. The key words in parentheses, "with our presence", means that WE should do this, rather than pay someone else to do this for us. When we choose to have children, our children should be more important than watching TV, going out with buddies, gambling junkets, weekend golf getaways, etc. The harder we work and play, the more dependent we become on someone else to raise our children. Perhaps we should work and play less and spend more time raising our children ourselves.

6. Appreciation of basic values and blessings (honesty, good will to others, health, etc.). Television and other influences on our children provide our children with distorted ideas of what is good and right. As parents we need to reinforce basic values such as honesty (even if it this puts us at a disadvantage), humility, good will to all, etc. Teaching our children to appreciate our blessings such as home, family, health, etc., will make them feel better about their personal situation, so that materialistic things such as expensive toys will be less distracting.

7. College should be an educational goal for ALL children. While this is an ideal, I really hope that ALL children will strive for college.

8. Anticipating the changes in adolescence can help ease the transition. This age group requires different parenting strategies and honest, open communication regarding the difficult issues of drugs and sex.

9. Spending money on self-indulgence reduces the money available for our children. The cost of a college education is high. Spending $100 today, means losing $200 of future value toward a college education tuition.