He wouldn't buy new sandals until his son found the old ones

What do you do when a preschool teacher and then a pediatrician both tell you, within weeks of each other, that your four-year-old son has severe ADHD and needs medication right away? Yaakov Ophir, an academic psychologist at Israel's Technion who had spent his career telling other parents exactly this, found himself suddenly unwilling to follow his own advice for his son, Maayan. He started reading instead.

What he found convinced him that ADHD, in most cases, doesn't meet the basic criteria psychologists use to define a disorder: it isn't rare, it doesn't cause the child distress, and it isn't dangerous to anyone. What it does is make it harder to sit still through hours of lecture in a classroom built around sitting still. So instead of medication, Ophir and his wife gave Maayan more structure, not less: real chores, from laundry to gardening, and consequences that actually stuck. When Maayan lost a brand-new pair of sandals, the family didn't rush out to replace them. He wore his old shoes in the heat until the sandals turned up.

By the time Maayan was ten, Ophir described him warmly: still disorganized, still likely to lose things, still full of energy, and also capable of making his own lunch, unloading the dishwasher, and getting his little sister to the bus every morning. Talking with him, Abigail Shrier noticed something she hadn't seen from a single American parent she'd interviewed whose child had been diagnosed and medicated: Ophir was visibly, warmly tickled by his son, exactly as he was.

This combination, high expectations paired with real warmth, is close to what psychologist Diana Baumrind identified decades ago as the authoritative parenting style, one of three she studied. The permissive parent avoids punishment and lets a child's preferences run the household. The authoritarian parent demands obedience without ever explaining the reasoning behind a rule. The authoritative parent does something harder: she stays warm, encourages genuine back-and-forth, and still holds firm when her judgment and her child's collide, maintaining real standards rather than deferring to whatever the child wants in the moment.

Baumrind's research found that children raised this way turned out the most independent, self-reliant, and emotionally regulated, and, notably, the happiest, less likely to report anxiety or depression than children raised either permissively or in a strictly authoritarian home. It unsettles a lot of contemporary parenting advice, most of which pushes hard against anything that looks like firm authority. Ophir didn't need a teacher's diagnosis or a prescription pad to tell him what his son needed. He needed to know his own kid, hold a standard, and stay with it for the long haul.

Start by handing your child a real responsibility, not a token chore, and let the natural consequence stand if they skip it, the way Ophir let his son go without new sandals until the old ones turned up. When your judgment and your child's preference genuinely collide, talk it through, but let your decision hold rather than caving to keep the peace. Make a point of noticing and enjoying your child's particular quirks out loud, rather than only measuring them against a teacher's checklist. When an expert hands you a diagnosis or a fix, weigh it seriously, yet remember that you know this child's daily life in a way no evaluation ever will.