Problem: You're Not Happy with How the Coach Disciplines Your Kid and/or the Team

Inevitably there will come a time when your child or member of his or her team will do something wrong – either they won't live up to their commitments to the team or their conduct off the filed will violate the team's standard – and ideally the coach will hold them accountable. How the coach handles this is crucial to what your child learns about values in action. A good coach will hold the guilty players responsible in a fair manner that might embarrass but not humiliate them. There's a very important difference. As one coach put it: "When your kid does something wrong, is held accountable, and consequently feels embarrassed, that's okay. Embarrassment shows remorse – a very good thing. But punishment and/or discipline whose sole purpose is to humiliate isn't something anyone should ever do to anyone else."

If you think the coach has overstepped his or her boundaries in disciplining the team or some of its players, including your child, take a hard look and decide whether you truly believe the coach acted unfairly, or whether you're just upset because it's your own kid. If you genuinely feel the punishment doesn't fit the crime, by all means speak to the coach respectfully about it. Coaches tell me that they often hear from parents when they've decided to suspend the whole team because a few players have violated the code of conduct – or from parents who feel the punishment is too severe relative to the infraction. In these cases, the coaches are taking principled stances because they want to achieve the long-term goal of student athletes respecting the code of conduct and living up to the coaches' high expectation of them. I could ask for no better coach for my sons.

One head of a school described to me how he'd attempted to discipline a lacrosse player who'd trashed the other team's locker room during an away game. The player's parents insisted that the coach didn't appreciate that it was "just a joke." The head of the school reluctantly let it go. Then two weeks later, this same girl played a particularly cruel trick involving a laxative on another student – also presumably "just a joke."

At that point, I decided to expel her from school. Her parents were total jerks about it. The locker room incident had led me to believe she hadn't accepted responsibility for her action and that they hadn't helped her accept responsibility with their attitude about it. They just kept saying to me, "Don't you get it? It was a joke. What's wrong with you?"

I felt I had to tell them that she could not come back on campus for the rest of the school year, and the parents could not come back on campus unless I specifically gave them permission. They would still come to the rest of the lacrosse games. They pulled their car up onto the field itself on the property of an adjoining church, right up to our property line, and then climbed out of their Suburban, honking their horn when we would score a goal. [The mother] would try to get girls to come over and talk to her daughter until I put an end to it.

--Charlie, head of private school

So the question to ask yourself right now is: "If that woman was my friend, would I say something to her? How could Perfect Parent World stop me from saying anything to her?"

Excerpted from 'Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads: Dealing With the Parents, Teachers, Coaches, and Counselors Who Can Make – Or Break – Your Child's Future' by Rosalind Wiseman. Copyright© 2006 by Rosalind Wiseman. Permission granted by Crown Publishing Group.