Here’s the truth: Some kids are harder (less agreeable, more willful) than others. Those kids don’t need less emphasis on obedience; they need more. Without today’s pseudo-therapeutic prattle about regulation and co-regulation and all the rest of it, we’d all intuit this—just like parents, grandparents, and teachers in every prior generation did. The closer the kid is to an unstoppable force, the stronger an immovable object he needs to meet in his parents.