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>"...Offering a default option of opting in, rather than opting out (as many have suggested with organ donations as well) doesn't take away choice but guides us to make better ones, according to Richard H. Thaler, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, and Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Chicago's law school, authors of "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness". Making choices can be most difficult in the area of health. While we don't want to go back to the days when doctors unilaterally determined what was best, there may be ways of changing policy so that families are not forced to make unbearable choices. >Professor Iyengar and some colleagues compared how American and French families coped after making the heart-wrenching decision to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from an infant. In the United States, parents must make the decision to end the treatment, while in France, the doctors decide, unless explicitly challenged by the parents. >French families weren't as angry or confused about what had happened, and focused much less on how things might have been or should have been than the American parents.

But the "last chance" for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: "Now this is your last chance." "This is really your last chance." "I'm giving you just one more chance. I'm not kidding." Of course you are, and your kids know it. They're not idiots. But they're also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting? Why all the choices - "What would you like to wear?"- and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They're toddlers, not Pakistan. I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic. Above all I'm confounded by the boundless fretting, as if ushering kids into adulthood were some newfangled sorcery dependent on a slew of child-rearing books and a bevy of child-rearing blogs.