Readers,

Boston.com and The Boston Globe are in the process of revamping the Child Caring blog. We plan to relaunch it shortly featuring new parenting experts. We wish Barbara the best and encourage you to stay tuned for the new Child Caring blog coming within the next several weeks.

Sincerely,
Ron Agrella, Boston.com

Well, I have to draw the line somewhere, so this is it. Thanks to all of you for your emails and wonderful comments about the blog, the column, and the chat. (You all know the blog is ending, but not the chat, right? The first and third Monday of the month, at noon at boston.com.)

Happy parenting!

You know that I have one son, right? He's my only. For years, I never wrote about parenting an only child. The issues it raised were just too raw for me. Once I got over that, I wrote several columns on the good and bad of raising only one child. My favorite of them was published in 2005.

Every kid dawdles at some time or other. This is one of my favorite columns, from 1999, just because.

Dealing with dawdling

As parents, we all know that our patience will be tried. So you may not be surprised to find yourself standing at the bottom of the stairs, with five minutes to go before the school bus arrives, shouting to your third-grader that she will be grounded for life if she doesn't get downstairs this minute. But then it gets worse: When she doesn't answer, you climb the
stairs with your fury barely in check, only to find her quietly playing with her Beanie Babies,
oblivious to time, the school bus, or you.

This is dawdling at its best.

As frustrating as it can be when children don't do what they need to do when they need to do it,
procrastination is a phenomenon of childhood that won't go away. We can't eliminate it, but we
can keep it from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, we often inadvertently make it worse instead
of better.

The first way we get into trouble is expecting children to have the same sense of time as we do.

"When they are engrossed in something, they have no sense of time passing," says psychologist Lenora Yuen of Palo Alto, Calif. That accounts for why a preschooler doesn't put toys away when you tell her to, why a 12-year-old doesn't see what the big deal
is that he hasn't taken the garbage out yet, or why a third-grader gets sidetracked by her Beanie
Babies.

A few hours ago, I posted a Golden Oldie about mothers and sons, so a dad emailed asking if I'd written about fathers and daughters. Bien sur! Here it is, from June, 2000. Meanwhile, here's a link to a terrific organization called Dads and Daughters.

FATHERS AND THE ADOLESCENT DAUGHTER
By Barbara F. Meltz, Globe Staff

Looking across the dance floor at a friend's child's bar mitzvah party not long ago, Sam Osherson found himself admiring a young woman. He had two thoughts: "Oh, how attractive!" and then "I'm old enough to be her father!"

As the girl turned around, he realized he was her father.

Osherson, a Cambridge psychologist and author whose specialty is parents' development, had reached a milestone he long anticipated as a father, that uh-oh moment when you recognize that your daughter is a sexual being. Despite his years of research, it took Osherson by surprise.

"You're her father," he says, "but you're also a male. It can be very disconcerting."

Even if a father isn't aroused by his daughter's budding sexuality, he is usually at least made uncomfortable by it, says Joe Kelly, executive director of Dads and Daughters, a national nonprofit organization that works to help strengthen father-daughter ties. "It's OK to have the feelings," says Kelly. "They're normal and natural. It's never OK to act on them."

Thankfully, the typical father doesn't. Instead, bewildered by his thoughts and worried he's a bad person for having them, he puts emotional and/or physical distance between himself and his daughter.

Here's a book that deserves to be in every school library:
"A school like mine, A unique celebration of schools around the world," by UNICEF and DK books.

As the mother of one child who is male, you had to figure that one of the columns on my Golden Oldie List had to be about mothers and sons, right? Here it is. Written in 1997 when my son was 10 -- which turns out to be a critical age for boys in their relationship with mom -- I was feeling extraneous and needed some reassurance that I wasn't in fact. Happily, I got it. And don't worry, the only child column isn't far behind.

I loved recycling long before it was fashionable to shop in consignment shops. Maybe it's because I was brought up to dislike waste. You know, "One person's trash is another person's treasure," and all that kind of stuff. Maybe it's just because recycling is simply good common sense. I'm convinced starting when our kids are young is the best way to effect change and I'm also a firm believer that it has to something we model for them, as a way of life. Edutopia magazine devotes an entire issue this month to recycling in schools., including this article, "From trash to treasure." Seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? To marry the values of home and school and keep the world from drowning in trash, all at the same time?

Not many press releases are clever enough to elicit a chuckle. This one, by Ciri Haugh of M/C/C in Dallas is worth sharing:

Top 5 Things You Don't Want to Hear When Your Kid is Surfing the Internet:

Number five: "Hey Mom, what's your credit card number?”
Number four: "Spyware 3000? Where did that come from?”
Number three: "What does it mean if the computer says, 'insert Windows backup disc now?'”
Number two: "Dad, you're always telling me I should be kind to others, so I just helped a Nigerian prince who sent me an e-mail!”

And the number one thing you don't want to hear when your kid is surfing the Internet: "Where did this window come from? Whoa! What's he doing to that lady??”

She was pitching a story about internet safety. Her client is the Family On-Line Safety Institute which offers a range of materials for parents on internet safety. Which also brings me to another one of my favorite columns, this one on cyber-bullying, from 2004.

Some days, being a parent is, well, plainly painful. I'm including this column, "How secrecy shuts out vital support," on my golden oldie list because it generated a lot of response at the time from parents who had struggled with feelings of shame or guilt from a teens' behavior. It appeared in 2000.

If you are the parent of a child 6 to 22 who has a visual or hearing impairment, there's bound to be a workshop of interest for you this Saturday, Oct. 20, at the annual Discover Conference at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. Although the website says pre-registration is required, Perkins PR director Marilyn Rea Beyer assures me that anyone who shows up at the door will be welcome.

Children play favorites, that's a fact. But probably not for the reasons you think.

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.

When your preschooler comes to you for the upteenth time with a drawing he's made and he's, oh so proudly showing it off, what, exactly, are you supposed to say? "Oh honey, this is sooo beautiful!!" Isn't t here a law about how many times a day you can say that? "Oh honey, what a nice..uh, ...." Isn't there a limit to how many times he's going to fill in the blank for you?

Questions like this plagued me when my son was at the early stages of drawing. I wanted to be encouraging without being phoney, helpful without being hokey. What's more, I wanted to know: Do these squiggles have any meaning? Is there something I should know about them? So, like so many issues in my parenting, I did some research and wrote a column. It's below. I suppose this is an odd one to include in my all-time-favorite list but I love it because it is a reminder of a very specific time in my son's life, and also because I learned so much in the process of reporting. I hope you will, too.

Illustration, Zohar Lazar, Bostonia Magazine

By now, the phrase "helicopter parent" is pretty widely understood as any parent who is hovering, hovering, ever ready -- and able; the able piece is important -- to swoop in out of the sky at a moment's notice to do...whatever. Is this a good or bad thing?

When it comes to our college students, this excerpt in an article in my alma mater's alumni magazine, "Bostonia," really nails it. Jessica Ullian writes:

"Wayne Snyder, the associate dean for students in the College of Arts and Sciences, remembers trying to explain to a concerned father that the University prefers to work with students directly to resolve academic issues. "He kept saying, 'No, no, she's just a child.' Snyder says. A BU junior tells of a friend's mother who rsearched professors' areas of expertise and then created fifteen possible class schedules for her daughter's freshman year."

Can we all agree that this dad and mom are both dead wrong? If you're a parent who gives your freshman a wake-up call every morning, can we agree to wonder, "When is this kid gonna take responsibility for himself?" How about agreeing that disinfecting bathrooms in your child's residence hall is not OK? Full disclosure: I thought really seriously about doing that at my son's fraternity.

The article concludes that collges around the country are adjusting to this helicopter era by building a more collaborative relationship with parents long before move-in day. But what about the next step, when these children become employees? Are parents hovering on the job, too? Uh oh. The article cites one survey that says 41 percent of parents gathered information on prospective employers for their children.

Today is the beginning of my last three days at the Boston Globe, ending 19 years as the Globe's parenting columnist and a 28-year career here. In these last days of blogging, I'd like to reprint some of my favorite columns.

As I mentioned on my chat today, my most requested column ever was called Mini-Magic. In it, I marvel at how preschool teachers cast a kind of spell over children. Did you ever see a preschool teacher raise her voice in anger at a child? Visibly lose patience, shake a finger at a child or throw up her arms in frustration? Do these teachers all have a saint gene the rest of us don't know about?

On the occasion of my son's 20th birthday, we got to reminiscing about birthday parties when he was little. The ones he remembered most fondly? You guessed it. The ones that barely cost a dime: one when he was 4, where the kids played in chalk on the driveway; the softball party at a local ball field where one cousin pitched, and another umped; the party at a friend's airplane hanger where they got to sit in the cockpit of his small plane. OK, the very best party was the one, when he was older, at Fenway. Did you know you can get tours of the park when it's empty? Yeah, that one wasn't free.

So aside from the Bar Mitzvah party (and yes, he does remember that one!), why does it come as no surprise that the party that probably cost the most, he doesn't remember at all? That's gotta be because there were so many parties at Chuck E Cheese, they all blur together.

So maybe I was just primed for what arrived in the mail at the office this week -- "Your Birthday Book, A Keepsake Journal" by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (or maybe I'm just a sentimental sucker?). Either way, I love the idea of writing about each birthday, gathering a few photos, and then having it, years later, to look back on. What fun that would have been last week!

Abbey, our family dog, is 13. When my son said goodbye to her as he headed back to college after a short break, it didn't take much to imagine what he was thinking: "Will she be here next time I'm home?"

Preparing for a cherished pet's death isn't easy, no matter what age we are. If it's something your family is facing, consider, "Jasper's Day" (Kids Can Press). Beautifully-written by Marjorie Blain Parker, with luscious illustrations by Janet Wilson, it's the story of a Golden who's dying of cancer. I'd recommend it for 4- to 10-year-olds.

Is nothing sacred? Another recall due to lead paint, this time involving the Cub Scouts! Yikes!

Jerry Seinfield and his wife, Jessica, have two picky eaters so Jessica has written a book, "Deceptively Delicious." Basically, it's how she fools her kids into eating healthy food: Pink pancakes, for instance, because she adds beets to the batter. Good idea or not? Personally, I've never been a fan of tricking kids; my theory is, it'll come back to haunt you sooner or later. On the other hand, it depends how frantic you are at the lack of nutrition your children are getting. Obviously, Seinfeld was high on that scale. Meanwhile, new research shows that picky eating is as much a genetic issue as environmental.

In case you're a parent who's problem is on the other end of the spectrum -- kids who eat more than they need -- keep reading for a column of mine, "With youth weight gain, food isn't the only issue."