Aha! Blog

Every week, starting when I was ten, my mother took me on a forty-five-minute drive to ballet school. We kept up this routine for two years, until it became clear that no amount of lessons would ever turn graceless, waistless me into the Sugar...

It’s an easy trap to fall into: You tell your kid to read for 20 minutes and he can have extra video-game time. Or ice cream. Or something new and shiny. Yet when we reward our children for spending time with a book, we are focusing their...

Soon after we brought our newborn daughter Caroline home from the hospital, her five-year-old brother Michael wanted us to take her back. I know that because that’s exactly what Michael told me and his mother.

My wife said, “OK.” And then...

As a toddler, our son Michael came into our bedroom at night to sleep on the carpet near our bed. He never knocked on the door or asked to come in or tried to climb into our bed with us. He always conked out on the side near his mother. Obviously...