“When your child has the skills to respond adaptively to demands and expectations, he does. If your child had the skills to handle disagreements and changes in plan and adults setting limits and demands being placed on him without falling apart, he’d be handling these challenges adaptively. Because he doesn’t have those skills, he isn’t. But let there be no doubt: he’d prefer to be handling those challenges adaptively because doing well is preferable. And because—and this is, without question, the most important theme of this entire book— kids do well if they can. ”