Bromfield is not the first to suggest tough love. (Dr. Spock, SuperNanny, even Dr. Sears, each recommend much the same, in their own ways.) Dan Kindlon, author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age, points out that we need to deny our powerful instinct to overprotect—and not only to keep our kids from being terrors when they are young. "We want [our children] to live in the cocoon of safety we were able to provide them when they were infants," he writes. "But their happiness as adults is largely dependent on the tools we give them, tools that will allow them to develop emotional maturity—to be honest with themselves, to be empathetic, to take initiative, to delay gratification, to learn from failure and ... to accept the consequences when they've done something wrong."

In terms of discipline, Bromfield is a big proponent of action over words. Throughout, he offers success stories of mothers who leave—the toy store, the restaurant, the room—when their children throw temper tantrums. (They of course take their kids with them; he does not advise that you leave your toddler stranded and alone.) A parent's fear of taking control is often greater than that of enduring the actual meltdown, Bromfield notes, and the kids often fall into line more quickly than expected. "Children, being hopeful," he consoles, "seek to grow better."

And we, in turn, seek the same thing. Reverse Bromfield's mandate that parents not indulge their children, and this too offers a lesson: Children unspoil us, and fast. I can remember a time—dimly, as now it seems from another century—when I thought that life could be pruned and directed ("Boundaries!"). I realize now, though, that this was my own spoiled view in adulthood, this illusory sense of control. Until I became a mother, I had little sense of the bewildering contradictions that exist in life. Having a child makes everything feel suddenly precarious with good fortune: My heart pounds faster with love and fear.

This simultaneity of emotion is beautifully rendered by Grace Paley in her 1959 short story "A Subject of Childhood" (from her collection The Little Disturbances of Man), when she describes a single mother rocking her youngest son: "He ... placed his open hand, its fingers stretching wide, across my breast. 'I love you, Mama,' he said.... I cradled him.... The sun in its course emerged from among the water towers of downtown office buildings and suddenly shone white and bright on me. Then through the short fat fingers of my son, interred forever, like a black and white barred king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes."

Margaret Drabble explores the notion that children catapult us into more generous versions of ourselves in her extraordinary 1965 novel The Millstone. In it, Rosamund becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with a man named George. She introduces the baby to George, who doesn't know he is the father:

"'She's beautiful,' said George.

'Yes, isn't she?' I said.

But it was these words of apparent agreement that measured our hopeless distance, for he had spoken for my sake and I because it was the truth.... I had lost the taste for half-knowledge. George, I could see, knew nothing with such certainty. I neither envied nor pitied his indifference, for he was myself, the self that but for accident ... but for womanhood, I would still have been."

And so it is that parents and children, coaxing each other along, enter new realms of maturity together.