PT#14: Take Books with a Grain of Salt

You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure it all out from books, and here's why: for any and every approach to parenting, there is a book. Most of them contradict each other, and most of them take the tone "if you don't do it this way, you are ruining your children." Talk to people you trust, and most importantly, trust your own instincts.

I remember early on with my oldest, there was some issue we were grappling over, and I asked a family friend who had 6 kids of her own and has run a pre-school for 30 years. What should we do? "Whatever works," she said.

That said, my next few tips will be for the books I found most helpful.