Altitude and attitude and cookies and kids

The advice you take and apply as a parent, the methods by which you raise your kids, discipline your kids, reward your kids; it all needs to be addressed similar to following a recipe (as you know how much I cook, take this analogy with a grain of salt).

Take for instance if you're going to bake a batch of cookies in Miami, FL in a convection oven and use the same recipe, but use a box oven in Denver, CO.  If you follow the recipe to the letter, you will not have the same degree of success at each location.  You have to consider the altitude and cooking environment (and perhaps other things that exceed by culinary intelligence) and make adjustments as necessary to the recipe.

So it is with raising kids.  You can get great advice (hopefully some from here) and if you apply it without considering your family, your kids, their attitude, characteristics, emotions, age, gender, personality, particular situation, circumstances of the moment, etc., you'll have mixed results.

Oh, and when you have more than one child be ready to hear "that's not fair!" when you tweak your child raising recipe.