Intro to the Guide

The collected wisdom of a lazy parent.

I’ve known the title of this book since my first child was a baby, and now that he’s twenty I finally feel experienced enough to write it. Am I a parenting expert? I’m not even sure what that is. For what it’s worth, I managed to raise a couple of kids to (near) adulthood without accidentally maiming them, and if I read that on a resume I’d totally buy it. I’m also pretty sure I passed the “She caused no major or intentional physical or emotional damage” class for the “Didn’t actually eff them up” degree at parenting school.

Does parenting expertise require study in the field of childhood development? If you count hours and hours of discussion with other parents at the playground, waiting for pick-up from school, at playdates and porch wine about all things related to our kids, I could practically teach the course. I would argue that we’re all experts on the subject of our own kids, and in most cases, no one else knows how to raise them better than the people who are raising them. I raised two amazing kids and the wisdom and experience I gained has directly impacted the raising of several more. Apart from that, my qualifications for writing this are pretty simple – I’m lazy (hence the title) in that I try to do things efficiently so I don’t have to redo them, and I’m an author, so I research people, their stories, their histories, and all the things that make them interesting for a living.

So this is a mixture of my own learned parenting efficiency, and the stories from all sorts of parents I’ve encountered in my life and my work. And there are two basic premises at the heart of it: first, there is no one right way to raise a kid, and second, trust your instincts. And with that in mind, this guide is full of all the tips, tricks, advice, and wisdom we (the parents who contributed our stories) learned along the way. And here’s the best part about reading this – you get to choose what fits and none of us will hold it against you if you don’t take our advice. I’m not your mother-in-law (though mine’s wonderful, so that’s not an insult), so feel free to use any of this collected wisdom that makes sense to your own philosophies – or don’t. You’re welcome to nod and smile at anything that doesn’t fit – it’s what we all did with the well-meaning tidbits we got from our mothers’ friends – and I hope somewhere in here are some things that go “clunk” right into place.

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