Weird Parenting Wins

Weird Parenting Wins Plot Summary

Introduction

Parenthood often feels like navigating uncharted territory without a map. I remember the first time my toddler had an epic meltdown in the grocery store - legs kicking, tears streaming, volume cranked to eleven. As fellow shoppers stared and my face burned with embarrassment, I desperately cycled through every conventional parenting tactic I knew. Nothing worked. Then, in a moment of pure desperation, I started speaking in a terrible robot voice: "SMALL-HUMAN-ERROR-DETECTED. RECALIBRATING-SYSTEM." My daughter stopped mid-scream, looked at me with wide eyes, and then burst into giggles. It wasn't textbook parenting, but in that chaotic moment, it was exactly what we needed. These unconventional victories – these weird, wonderful moments of parental ingenuity – are what make the challenging journey of raising children not just bearable but beautiful. When conventional wisdom fails us, parents tap into remarkable creativity to solve problems, diffuse tension, and connect with their children in meaningful ways. The solutions aren't always pretty or perfect, and they certainly won't be found in traditional parenting manuals, but they work. And more importantly, these quirky approaches often lead to unexpected moments of connection, laughter, and growth that transform both parent and child. The pages ahead celebrate these imperfect triumphs and remind us that sometimes the best parenting happens when we color outside the lines.

Chapter 1: The Art of Creative Problem Solving in Parenting

When I was three years old, I was convinced that a lion lived in my closet. A big ol' hulking lion. Just perched in there with a lion-size red baseball cap and a bright blue T-shirt. There was also a tiger who liked to lie on the shelf beside my bed, right above my record player. These beasts would glare at me menacingly, waiting for me to fall asleep so they could pounce—and, I don't know... eat me? I was too young to realize I was already dreaming; they seemed so real. A lion, a tiger. There must've been a bear, too. At least, according to a sign my mom penned neatly in all caps and taped to my door. It warned: NO LIONS, TIGERS, BEARS, OR GIANTS ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM! Giants, I guess, were a bit pouncy, too. The cool thing is, the sign worked. Those a-hole lions, tigers, bears, and giants stayed away from my room once that piece of paper was posted. But what about mice, foxes, and wolves? Ghosts, monsters, robbers? Those got added to the sign in my mom's same meticulous handwriting—but, with little real estate left on the paper, the new words got squeezed in, smaller than the original admonition. Later, in even tinier letters, she added alligators, crocodiles (just to be sure), witches, and finally, gorillas. I decorated the sign with stamps featuring covers of children's books and baby animals. Notably, one of the animals was a baby gorilla—maybe that helped to scare off the grown gorillas? It makes total sense that, as kids, we believe monsters are real. We're told all day by our teachers, our parents, our picture books to trust our imagination. A toilet-paper tube can be a telescope; a cardboard box a spaceship. If you sit in that box with your friend and make-believe hard enough, you can fly to the moon—as simple as Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers and landing back home. While we're hurtling through space with our preschool pals, our parents are stoking our imaginations with fantasies about Santa and the Tooth Fairy. If benevolent nocturnal visitors are real, why not evil ones? A college friend once told me about her intense childhood fear of the fireplace because, as she told her parents, "If Santa can come down the chimney, so can any old man." Strangely, the best weapon to fight imaginary creatures is often our own imagination. That's why my No Lions sign worked; I imagined that the words had the power to fend off my enemies. It's absurd, when you think about it—your own imagination battling itself. But comforting, too. Because these battles prove that sometimes when you imagine horrible things into existence, you can just as easily imagine them out of existence. Which is an enormous thing for a little mind to do.

Chapter 2: Food Battles and Eating Adventures

Back when I was in preschool, I thought eating was a waste of time. Why eat when you could be dialing your plastic rotary phone, pretending to call the boy from your playgroup who didn't know your name? Or running up and down the hallway of your apartment in Underoos? Even fake-cooking at a play stove my mom had rescued from the street trash was more fun than eating real food. And so my mom invented chicken snack. Chicken snack was not a meal; it was a snack. I mean, obviously; just look at its name. Never mind that my mom had breaded a chicken cutlet, seasoned it, and baked it in the oven—along with the other chicken cutlets she and my dad were going to have later that night. Chicken snack was cold. It was cut into cubes. And you ate it with a toothpick. On a stool by the kitchen sink. Not at the dining room table. See? Snack. Not boring old dinner. Of course, now, as a mother myself, I get why my mom had tricked me. Kids need nutrients. How would I have mustered the energy to call the boy who didn't know my name without a protein boost? I hear lots of parents fretting over whether their kids are ingesting enough of the right stuff. Calcium, iron. And, ahem, vegetables. It's likely that the average American child's abhorrence to veggies is largely cultural—plenty of children around the world regularly consume veggies fuss-free. I mean, some food aversions are genuine for sure. But kids also relish a classic battle of wills and toddlers quickly learn that their parents care a lot about what goes in their mouth. One day, though, I accidentally stumbled upon a solution to my lettuce problem with my daughter. Have you ever seen the very first SNL Digital Short? It aired in December 2005 and it's called "Lettuce." The video is presented as a PSA from the United Lettuce Growers Association. In it, a forlorn Andy Samberg and Will Forte sit on a brownstone stoop, commiserating over the loss of a friend—all the while pausing to take bites out of a head of iceberg lettuce. Like, mammothly huge chomps. One day I showed Sasha the video, thinking she might get a kick out of it. And oh, did she ever. She loved it so much, she demanded that the next time I went to the grocery store I buy a head of lettuce. She specified that it would be her lettuce. Not mine or Daddy's. When I finally came home with the lettuce, Sasha couldn't wait for me to put away the groceries; she dug around in the bags until she found the lettuce, then begged me to get my phone and shoot a video of her. We unwrapped the lettuce, stood her by the wall, and I started rolling. She actually did a pretty good Andy Samberg impression. Like, lettuce-eating-wise. And ever since then, lettuce has been a regular part of her diet. Sometimes I think that food, when it comes to kids, is all about context. Snacks trump dinner; chomping lettuce from a handheld ball trumps gingerly nibbling it from a plate.

Chapter 3: Managing Daily Routines with Humor and Creativity

When Sasha was about a year and a half, we bought a potty. A little red plastic one, which we placed on the bathroom floor beside the regular toilet. I'd have her sit on it before her bath—and lo and behold, sometimes when she'd stand up there would be pee in the pot. This is gonna be easy, I thought. I was too new to motherhood to realize that exhibiting smugness is the parental equivalent of answering the phone in a horror movie. Forget it, you're doomed. Just weeks after introducing Sasha to the potty, she broke her leg. It happened on a crisp fall day at the playground. She was standing at the top of a slide, looking like she was about to run straight down it, so I climbed the ladder in a flash, superhero-style, to save her. I grabbed her, put her on my lap, and away we flew. Down, down, down. On the way, the rubber sole of her shoe nicked the side rim and I heard one of the most horrible sounds of my life: the snap of her tiny tibia. After the broken leg, everything came to a screeching halt. My previously sleep-trained child reverted to crying all night long. She wouldn't go anywhere without her pacifier. Preferably one in her mouth and one in her pocket. And potty-training? Well, forget the potty; I was lucky if she'd poop at all. This is when I learned the phrase "poop withholding." I loaded her up with pear juice and pouches of mashed prunes. Still, she withheld for nearly a week. Sasha's cast stayed on for two months. When it came off, I thought it might be a good time to start trying the potty again. And she seemed mildly interested in the red hunk of plastic sitting in our bathroom. By that I mean, she'd treat it like a relaxing piece of furniture. And it's just rude to poop on nice furniture, right? Then came the bathtub incident. One fateful night, I was giving Sasha a bath. She was splashing around, singing, obsessively pouring water from a cup into the narrow spout of a toy boat. Suddenly a look came over her face, like, What is happening? Poop. Poop was happening. This thing—it was the size of her entire arm. And when Sasha turned around and saw it, she screamed as if she'd actually lost her arm. I pulled her out, toweled her off, and held her in her rocking chair while my husband went on poop duty—which I hear was not an easy cleanup job. This poop. It 100 percent destroyed Sasha. I tried to tell her it wasn't a big deal; we all poop in the tub sometimes. Over the next few days, I called relatives, getting them to tell stories about how they'd pooped in the tub when they were kids. Maybe that was true, maybe not—but they went with it. I took out every poop book at the library I could find. One made poop seem normal, another scientific, another funny, another cute. Sasha listened to the books with indifference. She would not poop. It was back to Withholdingsville, this time for a much longer stay. Anyway, after many struggles and tears and breakthroughs, we did manage to get her potty-trained. Sasha's third birthday was looming. Three is when society—at least American society—decides you're not a baby anymore. You get to take drop-off classes, without an attending grown-up. You get to go to pre-K. And according to packaging, you can play with smaller toys because you're not gonna try and snack on them. Well, on this kid's third birthday, she ran into our bedroom to wake us up. She told us she was ready. We grabbed her last box of diapers, ceremoniously sealed it up with packing tape, and marched it up to the attic—for her younger cousin, she said, as if they were just another hand-me-down. And that was it. She's been going in the toilet ever since. Creative solutions to routine challenges aren't just about working around a child's resistance – sometimes they're about recognizing where that resistance comes from and addressing the underlying fears or uncertainties. Whether it's potty training or getting dressed or brushing teeth, the daily routines that seem mundane to adults can be overwhelming milestones for our children. By approaching these moments with patience, understanding, and a dash of imaginative problem-solving, we transform potential power struggles into opportunities for growth and connection.

Chapter 4: Taming Fears and Building Confidence

When Sasha was four years old, she learned the story of Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, she'd heard it before in school and from me and her dad. But this time the teacher read a book that went all the way through to the end. That night, Sasha was screaming uncontrollably and I couldn't figure out why. Finally, after wrapping my arms around her to try to help her control her fit, she shouted, "You lied about Martin Luther King!" "What do you mean?" I asked. "You said he just died," she said accusingly. "He didn't just die. He was shot with a gun." "Oh," I said. "You're right. It's very, very upsetting, but that's true." She continued her tirade through tears: "He was the best person in the world. He had the best ideas. And they killed him." Sasha hasn't ever personally known anyone who's died. But after hearing the MLK story, she got it in her head that if someone like him could be shot dead, so could I. So could her dad. So could she. No amount of consoling would help. She screamed at the top of her lungs several nights in a row. I went to the teacher and asked if she'd consider revisiting the story and help the children process their new knowledge about the assassination of one of our country's greatest heroes. Maybe assure them that they were safe. The teacher told me none of the other kids had a problem hearing about the assassination, and this was Sasha's issue. Every morning on the way to school I was assaulted with a new barrage of questions about death: How am I going to die? How are you going to die? When are you going to die? How old will I be when you die? How many ways are there to die? "I don't know," I'd say. "It's really impossible to know." "Let's count," she'd say. "Getting shot, old age, being hit by a truck, drowning..." As Sasha's fear of death deepened, so did my fear of getting in the car with her. Some people wake up to their morning coffee; I'd wake up to my morning imagining-of-my-own-death. Eventually the intensity of Sasha's death probe did diminish. My guess is, it had a lot to do with entering kindergarten and riding the bus. Surrounded by other children each morning on the way to school, she had plenty of things to focus on other than her own mother's demise. Sasha herself figured out the win that helps calm her down about death—at least in the short term. At bedtime, she'll get dressed in her skeleton pj's—black fabric, with bones that glow in the dark. Then she'll slip on all ten of her glow-in-the-dark monster fingers and her glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth. Next, she'll stand under the bulb in her closet. Once she thinks her glow stuff is glowy enough, she'll shut off the lights. That's when she's ready to kill me. She'll come after me—bones, teeth, fingers aglow, shout-whispering, "I'm going to get you, Mommy. I'm going to put you in jail for ten hundred days." I play the damsel in distress: "What?! Ten hundred days! I can't survive ten hundred days!" "Then you'll die," she says creepily in my ear. Cue: me doing my best over-the-top horror movie–style death scene. We might do this three times in one sitting. It'd be more if it were up to her, but that's about as much dying as I can manage in a night. Through play, Sasha found a way to transform her fear into something she could control, a story where she held the power. What began as paralyzing anxiety became a theatrical performance, allowing her to confront the concept of death on her own terms. Sometimes the best way to tame our children's fears isn't to rationalize them away, but to give them tools to explore those fears safely, whether through creative play, art, or storytelling.

Chapter 5: Fostering Communication and Connection

My kid is constantly talking. She talks through car rides, through meals, through TV shows. She talks while making pretend smartphones out of paper, while brushing her teeth, while singing karaoke. She talks all day long, right up until the moment we turn off the lights and say good night. Even then, she talks as I'm walking out the door. If I ever sit quietly, say, at the dinner table, for more than ten seconds, she asks me accusingly, "Why are you not talking?" As if something is terribly wrong. Often my answer is, "I'm chewing!" Still, for all her talking, Sasha has never been one for talking about feelings. If she's upset, she'd way rather scream. That's starting to change, and my ears and blood pressure thank her. But back when she was in preschool, she was going through something intense. She was screaming a lot, hitting me a lot—she even bit me on the butt once. When I'd ask her to tell me what she was feeling, she'd yell, "I don't have any feelings!" It was hard to get to the bottom of what was troubling her. One afternoon, though, I uncovered a piece of the puzzle—in shocking detail—without even trying. Sasha had just come home from school. We were hanging out in the living room, sitting side by side in an armchair. She was small enough that we could fit that way without feeling squished. "Let's play school," Sasha said. "I'll be Lily and you be me." Lily was her best friend at the time. "Okay," I said, putting on my best peppy Sasha voice. "Hi, Lily." "You better play with me, Sasha," she said, suddenly turning snippy. "I am playing with you," I said. "No," she whispered in my ear, "say you want to go play with someone else." Ah, we were following some script in her head. I quickly got with the program: "I want to play with Brielle." "You can't play with her." She stuck her red-cheeked face up in mine, pausing for effect. "And if you do, you won't get the big surprise." "What's the big surprise?" I asked. "I'm not telling," Sasha said. "You'll only find out if you don't ever play with anyone else." "But I want the big surpriiiiise," I fake-whined. "Too bad," she said, sliding off the chair and stomping away. "You don't deserve it." I didn't have to ask to know we were reenacting a real scene from the playground. It broke my heart to know Sasha was already experiencing friend drama. But I also recognized in that moment that Sasha had dropped a giant gift in my lap. Without naming a single emotion, she was forcing me to feel everything she was feeling. And when I can feel what she's feeling, it helps me have more patience when, out of the blue, she loses her little mind. I'll Be You has become a regular part of my parenting repertoire. I'll be you; you be the teacher. I'll be you; you be our cat. Then there's the one she requests most frequently: I'll be you and you be me. It can be tough to see your kid do a spot-on imitation of you, but hey, you get to imitate them back. My pal Kirsten, who is a child therapist, tells me this role-playing thing is a variation on a real therapeutic technique she uses with kids. Dolls, blocks, trucks, and stuffed animals all can become props for seeing deeply into a child's inner world. As Kirsten's son got older, she found there's only one trick that has worked consistently to get him to open up. It's a tip she actually found in a fashion magazine interview with Angelina Jolie—who, somewhere in the middle of talking about acting and her sex life with Brad Pitt, began ruminating on raising a teenager. Plus, how you spend all this time with little kids, teaching and talking, and when they hit puberty, you suddenly need to shift gears and start listening. Kirsten remembers reading this and being like, Oh, wait, all I need to do is SHUT THE FUCK UP! Kirsten puts the shut-the-fuck-up technique into play a lot as a mom—but especially every spring, when her son traditionally goes through a week or two of complete and utter pissed-off-ed-ness at everyone and everything around him. On the nights when her son is going bonkers, Kirsten takes a walk with him. Well, "with" is a loose term. It's more like "behind." Her son walks at a tight clip, keeping a foot ahead of Kirsten, ranting about whatever's on his mind. Meanwhile, Kirsten races to keep up... and she listens. As parents, our instinct is often to jump in with advice, solutions, or corrections. Yet sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is create space for our children to express themselves freely, without judgment or interruption. Whether through role-play with younger children or the gift of attentive silence with teens, these moments of authentic communication become the foundation for trust and mutual understanding that will sustain our relationships through every developmental stage.

Chapter 6: Balancing Boundaries with Growing Independence

There is a family I've heard of. I don't know their last name or how to track them down. Someone once told me about a tradition of theirs—but since I can't get them to tell me about it directly, I'm gonna go off of what I was told by a friend of a friend and share it with you as I imagine it went down. Let's call this family the Smiths. The Smiths were respectful folks. They didn't curse—or they tried their darndest to keep it in check. But sometimes Donny Smith would do something so inconsiderate, Daddy Smith would be tempted to explode with a "What the fuck did you do that for?!" Instead, Dad would grit his teeth and say, "Donny, I need you to think about your actions and how they affect other people in this family." Donny's sister, Sonia Smith, would hear this from her room and think, "Shit, why does he always get off so easy? That's fucked up!" She'd shout downstairs, "No fair! You're so much harder on me, just 'cause I'm a girl." And Mama Smith... well, she'd be in the kitchen trying to tune it all out, but she'd be thinking, "Dammit all to fucking hell!" After big moments of tension, the Smiths would apologize to each other and mend the ruptures. But their favorite, most healing time as a family—the time they felt closest—came once a year, on New Year's Day, when they baked a cake. A "fuck" cake. They rotated who got to pick the flavor of the cake, but the flavor didn't matter, really. It was all about the icing. Mama Smith had bought a fancy pastry-decorating set, with frosting bags and different shaped tips. Every January 1, the batter went into a pan, the pan into the oven, and the Smiths watched whatever television series happened to be on marathon, as they eagerly waited for the cake to cook and cool. By mid-afternoon, it was ready, and they'd all stand around it, icing bags in hand, and they'd write all the words they'd been dying to say aloud but had (mostly) kept to themselves. No words were off-limits, but it was understood that on this cake, words were just words; they were not directed at anyone. Every once in a while, Mama would see something one of her kids had written and she'd go, "Oh, good one!" And she'd add it in her teacherly print. After the cake was completely covered in foul-mouthed graffiti, the Smiths each had a giant slice, plus extra helpings. The vulgar dessert rarely lasted more than a day—but if anything was left, the Smiths would finish it off at breakfast the next morning. When I became a parent, I needed to decide how I felt about cursing in front of my child. And I decided I mostly felt fine about it. I see cursing as a part of learning vocabulary. These words have meaning and power. And if you overuse them (which maybe I do sometimes), they lose their power (which is maybe a good thing, too). What I hadn't thought about is how I would react if I heard my daughter cursing. Recently, Sasha's been all about Lorde's album Melodrama. Now, I know I could've played her the clean version. But I didn't. And so last summer, on a road trip, we were blasting Lorde, when Sasha started singing "blowin' shit up with homemade d-d-d-dynamite." My husband and I shot each other looks. "We okay with that?" he asked. "I think so?" I said. "Sasha, you can sing it like that when you're with us," he told her, "but not with your friends, okay?" The way I see it, we're giving Sasha access to "grown-up" language a little bit at a time. Just like she'll learn about sex a little bit at a time, and death a little bit at a time, and disappointment and responsibility a little bit at a time. Maybe we'll work a fuck cake into the mix at some point, if we feel the need to give her a special outlet for certain words. But I very much look forward to the day when we're sitting at the kitchen counter drinking coffee and reading magazines, and she looks up from her article and goes, "Whoa, that's fucked up," and it seems completely normal. As our children grow, the boundaries we establish must evolve with them. The challenge isn't just deciding what's appropriate at each age, but finding the right balance between protection and preparation for the world they'll eventually navigate independently. Whether it's language, media consumption, or increasing responsibilities, these transitions offer opportunities to demonstrate our values while acknowledging our children's growing maturity. The most effective boundaries aren't rigid walls but flexible frameworks that expand as our children demonstrate readiness for greater freedom and responsibility.

Chapter 7: When Kids Outsmart Parents: Full Circle Moments

One morning when I was in middle school, my dad came into my room after my alarm went off. "Hey, it's a snow day!" he said. "You can go back to sleep." I was ecstatic. For about ten seconds. At which point he came back and said, "April Fool's." Turned out it was just a regular old spring day. And the horror show that is middle school was playing as scheduled. I'm not sure if that experience, combined with other little tricks my parents had played on me, led me to become a master of elaborate ruses, but become one I did. It started small—with the Bloody Fairy and my twin sister, Leslie. After Leslie mysteriously disappeared from our house, I moved on to hoaxing my friends. I had my first boyfriend completely convinced that girls didn't fart. Later, in college, I pulled off what I consider to be my April Fool's Masterpiece. In 1995, I was living in an artsy co-op with fifteen other students. There was a pay phone on the first floor, and someone had figured out how to cheat the phone so you wouldn't have to pay. On April 1, I sat with a friend, scheming about what might make a fun April Fool's joke on our housemates. Free long-distance calls were all the rage in the house—people giggling and gloating after spending an hour talking to a pal in Texas, a girlfriend in California—and suddenly we realized what we had to do. We had to convince them they'd been caught. There were a couple of engineering guys we knew who lived in a dorm nearby. We went to their room and filled them in on our evil plot. We'd need someone to call the pay phone and pretend to be a cop. It was too risky, though, for it to be one of them—our housemates knew their voices. So they offered up their friend Stan, who was pre-law. Stan was the kind of guy who, at twenty, already sounded lawyer-ish when just sitting in the cafeteria, complaining about whatever gross thing was for lunch that day. And so when Stan called the pay phone and read the script he'd written, saying that he was Officer Such and Such and that he'd gotten a tip that this phone was being used illegally, nobody questioned his veracity. By the time my friend and I were back at the co-op, our housemates were in crisis mode. A mandatory meeting had been called, with people gathering in the stairwell because they were too freaked out to even make it to the common room. What was our story gonna be? We all had to tell the same story. We couldn't let anyone get in trouble for this. At first, I was like, Holy shit, I can't believe this worked! And then I was like, Holy shit, I can't. Believe. This. Worked. Maybe too well. My conspiratorial friend and I exchanged knowing glances, making a silent pact that we would never tell our housemates the truth. It was clearly too late; they would've skewered us. Eight years after the pay phone incident, I was working in an after-school program run by the city of Chicago. Three days a week, for three hours each day, I co-taught a class on documentary writing and photography to a group of inner-city high schoolers. I figured they'd find a little April Fool's joke to be fun. Actually, I didn't really think it through. It was payday—but at the beginning of class I announced that the checks hadn't come in. I knew it was disappointing, but we'd get it all settled up next week. The kids were more than disappointed; they were incensed. Couldn't anything be done? Weren't we gonna stick up for them? Finally, I came clean. "April Fool's!" I said, pulling a few of the checks out of my bag and waving them in the air with a gotcha grin. They all groaned, and we went back to business as usual. Then, a few minutes later, from the back of the room, a phone rang. A girl picked up. I was about to tell this apprentice she needed to hang up or take the call from the hallway, when she let out a shriek. "Noooo!" she wailed. "The Sears Tower!" she screamed, leaping out of her seat. "A plane hit the Sears Tower!" The girl was now writhing in the aisle in the center of the room, holding her head in her hands and crying. It felt like everyone in the room made a simultaneous gasp. But before we could answer that question, the girl rose, walked toward me down the aisle, and slowly lifted her face. Her eyes had a satisfied glow. "April Fool's!" she shouted. And that, my friends, is when I stopped playing tricks on people. I sometimes think about playing them on my daughter. But then I imagine her getting older and outsmarting me just like Sears Tower girl. As our children grow, the tables eventually turn. The clever strategies we once used to navigate parenting challenges become templates our children adapt and sometimes improve upon. That moment when your child uses your own tricks against you – whether it's clever negotiation, creative problem-solving, or a well-executed prank – signals a profound developmental milestone. They've been watching, learning, and internalizing not just our words but our approaches to life's challenges and opportunities. While these full-circle moments might occasionally leave us outsmarted, they also represent the ultimate parenting win: raising a child who can think independently, adapt creatively, and face the world with the same resourcefulness we've modeled all along.

Summary

Parenting is perhaps the most unpredictable adventure we'll ever undertake – a journey where conventional wisdom and carefully crafted plans often crumble in the face of a determined toddler or a questioning teen. Yet within these challenges lie opportunities for our most creative, authentic, and memorable parenting moments. The weird wins described throughout these pages remind us that effective parenting isn't about perfection but adaptation, not about rigidly following rules but about flexibly responding to each unique child and situation with creativity, humor, and love. What unites all these unconventional approaches is their focus on connection rather than control. Whether it's creating a "No Monsters Allowed" sign for the bedroom door, inventing "chicken snack" to encourage healthy eating, playing role-reversal games to understand a child's perspective, or baking a "fuck cake" to safely release family tensions, these strategies work because they acknowledge children as full participants in family life while still providing the boundaries they need. They recognize that sometimes the path to teaching responsibility, independence, and emotional intelligence involves detours through silliness, imagination, and shared vulnerability. Most importantly, these weird wins remind us that the true measure of parenting success isn't raising perfect children who never test limits or make mistakes – it's cultivating resilient, creative humans who know they are deeply loved and who possess the confidence to eventually outgrow our guidance and perhaps even outsmart us at our own game.

About Author

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Hillary Frank

Hillary Frank is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. She is the author and illustrator of the novels Better Than Running at Night (Houghton Mifflin 2002), I Can't Tell You (Houghton Mifflin 2004), and The View From the Top (Penguin 2010). Better Than Running at Night was named a Top Ten First Youth Novel by Booklist and a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.Hillary is also an independent producer for a variety of programs on public radio.Her work has aired on This American Life, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Studio 360, Marketplace, Day to Day, Weekend America, and Chicago Matters. She has won awards for her radio stories from the Association for Women in Communications, the National Mental Health Association, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival, one of the highest honors in public radio.Hillary has taught courses and workshops to young and grown adults at Loyola University, River Oak Arts, Off Campus Writers' Workshop, and the City of Chicago's inner city writing program Words37. She has also appeared as a guest speaker at many schools and libraries, including the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Chicago Public Library, Tufts University, Simmons College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and high schools around the country. Both Hillary's first novel and her first radio story started as unsolicited submissions, which she hopes is proof to aspiring writers that getting published really is possible.

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