Growing up-in and of itself-is an enormous pain in the butt. The grades, the melodramatic infatuations, the looming necessity of earning a living… And hey, why do homework when , in five billion years, the sun is going to exhaust all its nuclear fuel and collapse into a dead, cold, shrunken cinder? And I didn’t ask to be born anyway… Oh, sorry-I’m getting a little carried away with all the adolescent angst…

What about those folkloric “growing pains”? There is no evidence that growing-the normal development of bones and joints and muscles-causes any pain. But many parents have experienced their children waking up in the middle of the night and complaining, for example, that their legs are sore. And because their children are in the midst of a growth spurt, the growth and the discomfort seem to be somehow connected. But this is not the case. Most probably your child has had a particularly active or strenuous or rough-and-tumble day of running and jumping and climbing, and all this activity can be tough on a kid’s joints and muscles. What he or she probably needs is some tender reassurance and perhaps a nice massage and some good ol’-fashioned cuddling. In the morning, the wee one should be fit as a fiddle. (if you think there’s been some injury, or if there’s persistent pain, or his or her joints are tender to the touch, or there’s a fever or rash, your child should be taken to a doctor for an examination.)

Being awakened late at night by a child complaining of vague aches and pains can be annoying. But try to be patient. It probably won’t help much to accuse your child of “faking ” symptoms for attention or to get out of going to school the next day.

By the way, when it comes to faking illness to get out of going to school (or “juvenile malingering”), Leyner could write the authoritative how-to guide. In an effort to evade the indignities of first grade, he perfected the art of using the hot bulb of his night-table lamp to heat a thermometer to a perfect 101 degrees- not too high a fever, but just enough to miss school. (This ruse requires an extremely adroit technique to prevent registering a shockingly high temperature that results in a day spent in the ER and not lounging around the house in pajamas with your mom waiting on you hand and foot.) Leyner was also skilled in convincingly simulating an exotic array of early-morning symptoms (for example, cyanosis, torticollis, and rectal prolapse ) that makes Ferris Bueller look like a rank amateur.