The situation Neal Pollack describes has occurred before, in generation after generation. At present we have a generation of parents who have decided that corporal punishment is bad and can never, ever "work" with children. But warehousing them in private facilities without proper services is a good idea? Are he and his wife unable to do anything else to make a living? Are they unable to move back to where they have the kid's grandparents to help them? This is a peculiarly middle-class problem. The Pollacks have come to expect society to allow them to pursue their artistic and literary dreams and have a child too. There are lots of parents throughout the world who are in much worse circumstances. If the Pollacks truly put their son's life and development first, they would take boring but higher-paying jobs (like the rest of us) or move to a place where the cost of living is lower. Otherwise, start spanking him.

-- Steven Dunlap

If the editors were hoping that Neal Pollack's piece about his family's struggle with their toddler's impulse-control issues would provide any illumination into the findings of the Yale Center report, they are mistaken. What I see in Mr. Pollack's tale is not a school system giving up on a child too early, but parents who are all too ready to give up on the hard work of parenting because it's just that -- hard.

It's not that parents like the Pollacks don't love their children. They do. But they seem to love their own identity as artistic professionals more. And they do not necessarily have to give up being hip artistic professionals to be effective parents in most usual circumstances.

But when the unusual strikes (as it so often does with children), that's when everything else must come second, behind what's best for the child. Most parents when faced with a child having serious discipline problems commit themselves to doing whatever is in their power to fix the problem, even if that means sacrifice on their part. It is, after all, part of the job description of being a parent.

Self-control is all about the recognition that what you want isn't always what's best for others, and sometimes the needs of others must come before your own. If the parents are incapable of mastering that concept, what makes you think the child will learn it?

-- Liz

As the stay-at-home parent of a 2-year-old I can sympathize with the author's frustration with his son's behavior, as well as the loss of personal time that having a child inevitably brings. However, Pollack brought that kid into the world, and he and his wife owe it to their son to do what's right for him rather than what's convenient for them. The kid is obviously crying out for individual attention, so they'd better suck it up and give it to him. Things will let up when he's in school.

Hire a babysitter for 20 hours a week, switch careers, sell your house, move into an apartment, do whatever it takes to give your kid the attention he needs. A sacrifice from you now will pay dividends later on when Elijah is an emotionally stable, independent teenager and adult.

-- Rene Caron

Neal Pollack's whining about the consequences of his and his wife's parenting leaves me cold. It is his and his wife's responsibility, no one else's, to see that his son is fit to socialize with other toddlers. The Montessori school in question risked lawsuits -- multiple lawsuits -- to allow the Pollacks time to correct their child's unacceptable behavior.

One must wonder what went through the Pollacks' collective mind when deciding to make a baby. Did they have no friends to counsel them on the effort needed to be parents? "It'll all work out" is not a philosophy to raise a child by; it takes work, hard work, and plenty of it.

The author diagnoses the problem as poor impulse control. Undoubtedly true -- but not only of his son. One can only hope that a parent or trusted friend will supply a healthy boot to their collective posterior, pointing out that a child requires a good deal of attention, and effort is required to instill in him a sense of right and wrong.

-- Jared Hecker

Elijah needs a spanking, and quite frankly so do his parents.

I didn't bite or hit other children when I was small, because I knew I would get a spanking if I did. I didn't not bite children at the prospect of getting ice cream or having a family photo not taken away. With reasoning like this it's no wonder children are out of control and getting expelled from preschool.

Physical discipline (read: spanking) has its place, time and way, and one of those times is when a child behaves violently. I know some people would argue that spanking a child for behaving violently just reinforces the idea that violence is OK, but there is a way to pull it off as discipline and not as violence. And the first rule is to never spank out of anger. Spanking is not to be done when you are at your wit's end, but after a cool-off period. Give the child and parent some time to calm down and become less emotional. If my 2-year-old daughter bit my wife, there would be a definite spanking. She would be told she was going to get a spanking and to go to her room (or whatever timeout area there was) and to think about what she did. Once everybody had calmed down, my wife and I would explain to our daughter why she was getting spanked, why what she did was wrong, how it hurt her mother and made her sad, and how that type of behavior will result in a spanking. Then she would receive a not-too-firm smack on the derriere.

Looking back on my childhood, I feel that the most effective part of the disciplining process was the time between my bad behavior and the actual spanking that I knew was coming. I was terrified. It was the anticipation of getting spanked that was the real punishment, always worse than the actual spanking. This is the fear that helped set boundaries for my behavior in the future. When it came time for the actual spanking (maybe 20 minutes after the "incident") I was a wreck, as I should have been. My parents would barely even have to spank me.

There is much at fault with the way people raise children these days. For example, rewarding a child with ice cream for not biting? Children should be punished for their violent behavior, not rewarded for the lack of it. The child in this article appears to have no boundaries, and yes, the parents are solely to blame. And why should a preschool be forced to deal with a child that is out of control? It's not the school's job to set the boundaries for a child as much as it is their responsibility to maintain the boundaries set by parents, in addition to educating and stimulating our children.

Children need to have a healthy amount of fear. Just as they need to be afraid of getting hurt from putting a paper clip in an outlet, so they need to be scared that Mommy or Daddy will spank them if they bite. It's for their own good.

-- Robert Dall

All marriages suffer, change, grow because of kids. What Elijah needs is two parents who actually parent him. Mr. Pollack, control what you can control. If your benefits are terrible, then get a different job with better benefits.

My daughter had a friend in daycare that she had a particularly violent fight with when she was 3 and got serious scratches on her face. She is 11 now and to this day, when I see those scars, I get furious.

-- Helen

I read with dismay the article by Mr. Pollack. If Mr. Pollack had experienced a social disorder that included some violent tendencies, what made him think his child would somehow avoid the same?

I don't have children. I'm 51. I'm manic depressive and basically from a long line of losers. I just thought about it for two seconds and thought, "Why should this line continue?" It wasn't just the right thing to do -- it was the only thing to do.

-- N. de Wolfe

Yet another article about how incredibly difficult it is to be a parent. My God, the frequency of articles with this tone in Salon is mind-numbing. You have a child, you are responsible for raising it. I don't care what you want -- your child's needs come first.

Hundreds of millions of people on the planet are caring for their kids right now. Fortunately, most do not have to be forced into the situation.

-- James E. Cann

My son nearly got fired at 2 1/2 for what was called "aggressive biting" by his expensive full-day daycare program. When the problem first arose, we whipped into action -- met with the teacher and the school director to put together a plan for addressing the problem (rather, we made suggestions that they rejected one by one); hired an early-childhood specialist to observe the room; took him to therapy; went to therapy ourselves; read him age-appropriate books about anger and biting; and tried to reinforce good behavior and positively deal with antisocial behavior.

It turned out that while he was angry at me for working a lot (I was managing a major piece of litigation at what was supposed to be a family-friendly job), his teacher wasn't helping things at all with her punitive approach to dealing with antisocial behavior and her generally cold way of interacting with the kids. When he bit again a few months later, and they tried to kick him out, I got litigious on them for just long enough to buy us some time to get him into a new program.

It was a terrible experience, one of the worst of my life. What was shocking to me was that in the course of trying to resolve this, I discovered that this highly rated program had teachers, and even a director, who did not have the proper certifications because they had not worked with preschoolers before. They were treating 2- and 3-year-olds like little 5-year-olds. In the room where he was supposed to move at 3, the teachers were spending an inordinate amount of time on "academic" subjects at the expense of active or imaginative play. He's doing well now, his new teachers tell me that he is the most compliant and happy child in the room, and I feel like we dodged a bullet.

-- Name Withheld

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