Should a 7- or 8-year-old attend a grandparent's funeral? What about a 5-year-old, or a 3- or 4-year-old? Is age even the issue? It's the lucky families among us who never have to deal with this issue. But just in case, here's a column from 1998 that's among my oldies but goodies.

In this or any of my columns, you may be surprised at some of the experts' suggestions. For instance, would you ever think to include a child in choosing a grandparent's casket?

This seems like a good point to remind everyone that the driving force for me in writing my columns throughout the years was to help parents understand developmentally what was going on for a child vis a vis a particular issue, and to offer appropriate coping mechanisms. The thinking behind that is that if you know what fuels a child's behavior -- if you know what cognitive, social and emotional equipment they bring to the moment -- you are better able to feed into their strengths rather than their weaknesses. That, in turn, reduces power struggles and helps to establish a loving, trusting relationship which, in my mind, is what good parenting is all about.

There is, however, a big caveat, and this is true not only of my writing, but of any expert you ever come across in your parenting route: Parents -- and parents alone -- know their child best. An expert can provide you with the most up-to-the-minute research, the hot new professionals' thinking. That doesn't make it right for you and your family. My hope has always been that my writing would inform parents but that, in the end, they would weigh the information carefully: "Does this make sense for my child? For my family?"

So, no, you may not want to take your child along to choose his grandfather's casket.