I consider myself to be a knowledgeable parent, but a great challenge for me was a child development psychology class. I have been interested in child development and psychology for as long as I can remember so, when I went back to school, it was only natural that I get a degree specializing in that field. I had figured that, as an astute student of human nature, I would be well within my comfort zone. The joke was on me when the child development psychology class was more strange and foreign than I could have imagined.

Not that it wasn’t a fascinating class. It can be a real joy to be challenged, and I felt challenged very day. Child psychology, I learned in that class, is anything but static. From day to day, week to week, and month to month, children are learning and becoming better, more sophisticated thinkers. That means that the interests, fears, and obsessions that a kid has one day will not necessarily even be a factor within a month or two. Kids come up with phobias, only to lose them just as quickly. They get so interested in a toy that they can’t put it down, only to get bored with it all of a sudden and never touch it again. These are some of the paradoxes of child development psychology.