And you can see what the problem is just by reading the title: Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.

That the author, Erica Komisar, even thinks there is a state called "motherhood" marks her straight off as an old-fashioned binary sex-role thinker.

As for "prioritising" being a mother for three years - she must be mad. How are women to maintain their jobs and careers?

Has she never heard of gender equality in the family? Does she not know that men can do child care just as well as women if they really try?

These are the kind of sentiments (not my own) that must have driven an interviewer for Good Morning America to tell Ms Komisar, seconds before the camera went live, "I don't believe in the premise of your book at all. I don't like your book."

And that, according to The Wall Street Journal, was about the only air time she got with a major outlet apart from Fox & Friends, which liked her book a lot.

But let's cut to the chase. Erica Komisar knows a thing or two. Unlike most gender theorists she has clocked up three decades of clinical practice, first as a social worker and then as an analyst.

She has raised three children, and put off writing her book for 12 years to be "emotionally and physically present" to them. Presumably she kept her professional practice going for some of that time.

It was her professional experience, however, that made the book necessary. She told WSJ:

"What I was seeing was an increase in children being diagnosed with ADHD and an increase in aggression in children, particularly in little boys, and an increase in depression in little girls."

More youngsters were also being diagnosed with "social disorders" whose symptoms resembled those of autism - "having difficulty relating to other children, having difficulty with empathy."

Komisar came to the conclusion that it was "the absence of mothers in children's lives on a daily basis was … one of the triggers for these mental disorders." Continue reading

• Carolyn Moynihan is a New Zealand journalist with a special interest in family issues, and is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

If you keep telling them you're going to turn the car around if they don't behave, and never actually turn the car around when they continue to act like... well, children, they will learn that the car isn't going to get turned around no matter what they do.

This may seem obvious. It's straight from the parenting 101 books that I failed to read when I first started taking this experiential course in child-rearing a dozen years ago.

But, I've been told lately that I'm not very good at this whole follow through thing.

It's not like I go around making threats to my kids. It's just that sometimes they act like insane little monsters, and the fear of sanctions is the only way I can think of to get them to behave. So, threats happen.

Take, for instance, a dinner out I had on a recent night with two of our kids and their grandparents. My wife was out of town with our two middle kids visiting her sister, so I had responsibility for our 5-year-old boy and 12-your-old daughter for the week. My parents, fresh back from a summer trip to Michigan and Canada, called and asked if we wanted to have dinner at a neat little seafood place.

Sure, I figured. Why not?

What I didn't figure was that after a week with his father's later bedtimes and lack of disciplinary follow-through the 5-year-old boy would be primed and ready for his worst restaurant behaviour in recent memory.

Usually, with his middle sisters around, he just blends into our family's typical restaurant commotion and acts kid-like but within acceptable parameters. Continue reading

• Cort Ruddy is a writer, husband and father of four living in Upstate New York.

I sometimes feel annoyed by mothers that seem to keep their baby all to themselves when all they are doing, perhaps subconsciously, is protecting their child as they know how.

Which leads me to the topic of over-parenting: because yup, parents, it's a thing - at least according to a recent stuff.co.nz article. And I'd have to agree!

Like most things, parents wouldn't even be aware that they're doing it. But, also like most things, parenting should beware of extremes and strive for a healthy balance between guiding kids and allowing them to flourish freely.

According to the article, mums and dads fall into over-parenting because of fear (and really, most bad decisions come from a place of fear).

As put by Dr. Wendy Mogel, clinical psychologist and author: "Parents today are either afraid for their children or afraid of their children." Dr. Wendy has 10 signs of over-parenting and tips to work through them, and I'm going to share a few of them here:

You find it hard to say 'no'

Those toys at the supermarket, that McDonalds run on the way home, they want to eat dinner now instead of later… I think a lot of parents find it hard to say "no" to these things.

Sometimes it's because it's easier to just give in, but I think it stems mostly from not wanting their kids to experience any emotions like negative emotions. Yes, these emotions aren't fun, but we all need to learn how to deal with them in a healthy manner.

Imagine if you were protected from them all your childhood and then got hit with the real world? That would be way less fun! Continue reading

• Tamara Rajakariar lives in Australia and is a Journalism graduate from the University of Technology, Sydney.