In the past 40 years, roughly since the 1960s, parenting has undergone a revolution in thinking. Traditional methods were questioned, in many cases rejected, and a spirit of experimentation resulted in the adoption of many alternatives.

Many people during the 1960s began to believe that the restrictive, almost Victorian parenting styles of earlier generations were unsuited to a modern society. Many converging views led to that conclusion, including those of influential child psychologists.

Most child development professionals, following a study by Thomas and Chess in the 1950s, hold that temperament is genetic. Personality, by contrast, is influenced by environment and self-development.

The characteristics of temperament - nine categories, including Activity Level, Sensitivity, Adaptability, and others - are sometimes regarded by parents as a source of frustration, since they are genetic and therefore not subject to much change.

Being a step-parent is somewhat like being in middle management - you get the complaints from 'above' and 'below'. One way out of this dilemma is to step out from the middle and simply be part of 'senior management'. Successful employment of that strategy will require cooperation from the biological parent. But if you don't have that already, that may well be a major source of the difficulty to begin with.

Teaching responsibility is one of the most difficult aspects of parenting. It is here that parents most often worry about the dilemma of stifling individual choice versus instilling values and habits that lead to appropriate behavior.

The parallel of that dilemma is the reasonable desire for maximum individual freedom, but the need that arises to respect the rights of others. The way out of the dilemma is to recognize that healthy self-interest and respect for others not only do not conflict but reinforce one another.

Sometimes a child labeled 'difficult' is just expressing a healthy need for independence. But in other cases, the label is actually too mild. Adults can be violent, irresponsible, indifferent to the harm they do others and typically that behavior begins in childhood.

Not all such children are potential criminals, but they share some of the characteristics - refusal to fully accept reality, poor impulse control, lack of empathy, disrespect for the rights of others and a range of destructive behavior against people, animals and property.

Knowing when to require a child to obey and when to let them take the consequences of an independent choice is always a tough dilemma for parents. One pair of ideas that can help them are: natural consequences and logical consequences.

Natural consequences are the reality-determined effect of some choice a child has made. Burning a hand on a hot stove is the most obvious and extreme example. No intervention on the parent's part is needed to show the child the connection between its ill-chosen action and the bad result.

Sometimes being a parent is like being in middle management. You have not only a whole host of issues to deal with in relation to the kids, but grandparents can introduce another set. Grandparents in the parenting mix present all the issues of influence from others, but with the obvious added wrinkle that they have a special relationship to both the parents and the children.

So, how does a parent maximize all the good things grandparents bring, while minimizing some of the potential difficulties?

Few things in the life of a family are as traumatic as when it alters through divorce. Each individual involved is often confused, angry, feeling betrayed and uncertain about what comes next.

Making the transition even more difficult, there will be many practical changes that affect both parents and children. Living arrangements will alter, incomes may well change and there will often now be only one adult to take on both work and home responsibilities. Dealing with those common and real-life issues is doubly difficult when emotions are running high.

Few subjects in parenting are as fundamental, or as important, as communication. Humans function so much by language, whether implicit or explicit, that learning how to communicate effectively affects virtually every other sphere of family relations.

But developing good strategies for good communication, based on sound ideas, is extremely complicated. Individuals differ so widely in age, temperament and circumstances that outlining a one size fits all approach is guaranteed to fail at the outset.