About Dr. Laura Markham

& Your Parenting Solutions.com

Dr. Laura Markham is the Dear Abby of Parenting for the 21st Century and the founding editor of the YourParentingSolutions.com website. The New Dr Laura’s positive approach to raising happy, cooperative kids helps parents bypass power struggles using the everyday secret that strengthens the parent-child relationship: limits accompanied by empathy and respect. 

She contends that the key to happy parenting lies in forging a close relationship with your child, beginning today.  Whether you’re coping with toddler tantrums, teen turmoil, or anything in between, you can begin to turn the situation around today by changing the way you relate to your child.

Why Parents Need Help

When a baby's on the way, most women and their partners spend a lot of time thinking and wondering about the baby who will eventually arrive.  Many go to childbirth classes and read books about what to expect. We daydream happily as we fold impossibly tiny teeshirts. Then labor starts, and time stops.

When our heroes step back into time again, they're suddenly parents, with a real live infant all their own. Sleep-deprived, overwhelmed, faced with renegotiating their relationship and their entire lives, they make the best minute by minute decisions they can for this new person for whom they are completely responsible.

But our society doesn't offer much help with the awesome responsibility of becoming a parent. Of course, every bookstore has shelves of books on raising baby. Many of these books encourage parents’ anxieties about giving their child the best possible start in life, offering advice on everything from making one’s own baby food to stimulating intelligence by playing Mozart. But how to make your way among all the different opinions?

The best teacher is always your baby -- who will let you know what he wants! But parenting is full of hard decisions, and most of us find it reassuring to consult a trusted "expert" who's seen it all before.  And the older your kids get, the more complicated parenting gets, as any parent can tell you, and the harder it is to find solutions that go to the source of your parenting challenges:

    * Does it matter how long I stay home with the baby? Kids who go to daycare are just fine, aren’t they?
    * My two year old won’t go to sleep at night.
    * The sitter says my four year old is hitting the other kids.
    * My six year old is driving me crazy still wetting the bed.
    * My eight year old can’t seem to make friends.
    * How can I get my ten year old to read books?
    * My twelve year old is mercilessly cruel to his younger brother.
    * Exactly how rude should I let my fourteen year old be to me?
    * My sixteen year old barely pays attention to his schoolwork.
    * I know my eighteen year old drinks at parties, and I worry about men taking advantage of her.

Your Parenting Solutions

Which is where YOUR PARENTING SOLUTIONS comes in. I'm a psychologist, and a mother. I've run newspaper and magazine companies with 100 employees, served on corporate boards, and coached business leaders and moms.

Bottom line: I think there is no job harder, or more rewarding, than raising children. This is skilled work, demanding work, and a critical contribution to the health of the human race. And in our hyper-commercialized, hyper-sexualized culture, parents need all the help they can get to raise healthy kids with solid values.

This web site will help you shape a home life and parenting habits that support your children to develop their full potential. Not to mention, that make life more fulfilling for you.  How?

The relationship you build and nurture with your child. 

A good parent-child relationship protects your child from the excesses of the culture, gets you through the bad times, and creates more good times -- all by making it easier to influence your child, and by helping you to listen to, learn from, and meet the needs of your unique child. A close bond not only makes our kids want to please us, it gives us access to our natural parenting know-how. The reason so many of us find parenting such a challenge is that no amount of "parenting skills" can make up for the lack of a close parent-child relationship.

Thousands of studies have been done in the past decade that vastly increase our knowledge of what children need to develop optimally.  But most of that research is reported in academic journals, not to parents.  My goal is to present this research in an accessible format to the parents who so vitally need it.

Gratitude to the Real Heroes

While I alone am responsible for everything that appears on this site, any contribution I make is possible only because I stand on the shoulders of all those who have preceded me in this field.  I owe a great debt to many others who have researched and thought deeply about child-raising; some of their books are recommended under the "Additional Resources" section of each topic, many of them are academic researchers who may or may not be mentioned in the text.

Mostly, though, I learn every day from the real heroes -- all the moms and dads I encounter who get up every day and love their kids through all the struggles of growing up, and who are willing to grow, themselves, in the process.

I'd love to hear from you.  What's helpful?  What's not? What solutions have worked for you that you could share with other parents? What would you like to read more about? Please post a comment in the Parents' Forum, or write me a private email.

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Laura Markham, Ph.D., is the Dear Abby of Parenting for the 21st century. A clinical psychologist trained at Columbia University in NewYork, she is the founding editor of  YourParentingSolutions.com. The Good Dr. Laura is also a highly sought-after speaker and workshop leader who assists parents in transforming their relationships with their children (from babies to teens). She serves as Parenting Expert for Hip Slope Mama, ParentingBookmark.com, Wellness.com and Pregnancy.org, on which she hosts an online chat for moms. Her work appears regularly on a dozen parenting websites and in print. Dr. Markham has held many challenging jobs but thinks raising children is the hardest, and most rewarding, work in the world. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with her husband, 13 year old daughter, and 17 year old son.