You don't fully define the members of your family outside of yourself and your daughter. Is her father involved? Does he have an opinion on the co-sleeping? My sense is that perhaps your nuclear family consists only of you and your daughter, and the situation has been going on for a very long time -- perhaps the entire eight years of your daughter's life.

First, support your daughter. Help her understand why people stare and whisper. Explain to her that it's their problem, not hers -- and that she is beautiful and wonderful and strong. Emphasize that she is differently-abled.

Starting middle school can be an exciting time filled with many challenges, including changing classrooms, meeting new teachers and making new friends. To help ease the transition for your son, take a tour of the school ahead of time and walk to each of his classes if you know where they are.

To quote Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years, "Who you are in fifth grade is who everybody else in fifth grade says you are." That's a harsh reality of middle childhood, and you are so right when you point out that friendship is critically important to an 8-year-old.

There is no "right" answer to this question -- only the one that fits your family's needs and beliefs. Many girls will start to experience darkening and coarsening of their hair sometime between the ages of 10 and 13, with lots of cultural variation. In the melting pot that we've become in the U.S., this is now even harder to predict.

How unfair — and perfectly ridiculous — it is that people make assumptions about others based on something as simple as the way a person's pants hang or the way he styles his hair? As if intelligence can be measured in the inches between a boy's waist and the top of his jeans, or kindness, honesty, and trustworthiness be determined by the length of one's hair. Really, it's quite infuriating to think that in this day and age, people still take it upon themselves to make mass pronouncements about a massive group of people based on something so simplistic as the way they dress.

When young girls first start wearing makeup, they usually wear too much. She's lucky to have you to guide her. Explain to her that beauty comes from within and that too much make up can actually distract from her natural beauty. At age 11, lip-gloss and a tiny bit of eye shadow should suffice.

The problem may be with the game, not your child. After all, we teach kids to share—except when you play a game like this. Then you’re supposed to push kids out of the way so you can be first.