Big Trick on Wee Ones

Thank you for securing your husband's cooperation in advance! It's a bit of a luxury for me to be able to simply state my opinion, without having to lay out an elaborate plan of behavioral modification for a misbehaving spouse who doesn't give a hoot what Miss Conduct thinks.

And your husband is misbehaving, I'm afraid. Adults need to scaffold children's social development, not mess with their wee heads by putting them in no-win situations. What he's doing isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's unhelpful and somewhat unkind. After all, how would he like it if a child turned the tables on him and said, "I'll tell you, but you have to tell me which of your children you like best first"? Worse yet, what if one of them found the question easy to answer? "Mommy, because Daddy has too many beers and yells at us a lot." Does he really want to open that door?

Children can't learn the rules of polite discourse unless that's how they're treated themselves. Which doesn't mean your husband can never ask a child teasing or silly hypothetical questions -- just stick with ones that won't make the poor kid feel like a disloyal monster for answering.

A student in my college math class is constantly the first one to answer the professor's questions, spoiling for the rest of us a chance to think about the answer. I find this distracting and unfair. Twice the professor has made a general request that if students have already answered a few questions, they should give others a chance, but this student's response frequency has not dwindled. My mother said I should let the professor deal with this issue, but I am gutsy enough to politely talk to the student after class. What do you think? E.S. / Wellesley Summon up your gutsy politeness and say something to your fellow student. You apparently feel confident in your ability to handle the situation; you haven't asked me for advice on what to say, only permission to say it. So I'll give you that permission and abstain from offering advice on phrasing or timing. Usually I'm happy to offer more advice than I've technically been asked for, but you're a college student, and that changes my approach a little.

College isn't just a time for book learning, it's a time for social experimentation, and those social experiments often teach you more than you could ever learn in class. As a student of human nature, you have evaluated a situation and developed a hypothesis about what might change it for the better. So go test your hypothesis and see if it works out the way you think it will. Whether it does or not, you'll learn something at least as useful as math.

I've been invited to an early evening wedding this spring. The attire is listed as "dressy casual." For men, it says "jackets, no ties." What is the appropriate dress for women? M.H. / Quincy Women can wear a jacket and no tie too, you know -- ideally, for a spring wedding, a jacket that says "festive" rather than "staff meeting" and that is worn over a pretty dress or skirt and top in cheerful colors. And, as always, it's best not to wear all black, all white, or something that will make you more glamorous than the bride.

Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a Cambridge-based writer with a PhD in psychology.