UPDATE: This fabulous book is done, and it’s currently available for pre-order! Reserve your copy now so you can be one of the first to get it in your hot little hands on August 20, 2019!
You guys! I have big news, and I am SO excited to tell you about it. I just sold my third book!
This is the book I was born to write. It’ll be fun to read and funny as hell and full of relevant, useful ideas and information. It’s a deep (but not too deep!) look into the most important and challenging work of my life: how to stop losing my shit at my kids.
No, seriously. That’s what the book is about. In fact, the working title is How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids.
Let me give you the inside scoop on how I came up with this idea. (I mean, other than the years I spent losing my shit with my daughters and feeling horrible about it and swearing I wouldn’t do it again and then doing it again of course and feeling even worse, and, well, you get the picture. But I’ve evolved, which means now when I do lose it with my kids, I cut myself some slack about it, which makes me significantly less likely to lose it again any time soon.)
Anyway, back to the book. The thing is, there are a lot of parenting books out there. Like, a bajillion. (I know, because I’m responsible for two, soon to be three, of them.) Many of these books are about how we should be parenting better: how to get our little ankle-biters to eat and sleep and do their homework and manage big feelings and tolerate failures. Other books focus on how to respond to our children in difficult moments, how to set limits while staying connected, how to calm the munchkins down and acknowledge their feelings and help them use their words. No, not those words. The other words.
The advice in most of these books is excellent. It’s clever and smart and backed by good research and it has the potential to improve our children’s lives, and hopefully ours too. (Everything’s better when the kids sleep, amIright?)
There’s just one problem with all of this advice. It’s HARD to follow. It’s hard to remember what to do when and how to do it well and what to do after we do it and it still doesn’t work. Parenting is especially hard when we’re triggered, either by our own exhaustion, confusion, or anxiety or by our kid’s meltdown or freak out or the phases of the moon or whatever. Our stress levels go up, our energy levels go down, and before we know it, we’re snapping or yelling or slamming doors. We’re losing our shit.
The ability to stay calm is the first, and I would argue, most important step towards being the kind of parent we all want to be. When we’re calm, we can see more clearly, think through our options, and make the best possible choice about how to proceed. This is no guarantee that we’ll be able to perfectly execute on the latest parenting advice, but I can guarantee you this, any response that comes from an intentional place is going to be a hell of a lot more skillful than whatever knee-jerk reaction we might have busted out with otherwise.
In addition, not losing your shit is just more fun than losing it. I know from experience.
Now, to be fair, a lot of parenting books do acknowledge how hard parenting is, and that we can’t parent from an empty cup (or whatever the current metaphor for self-care happens to be). That’s true, but this particular issue needs more than lip-service. If all we needed to not lose our shit was a reminder not to, well, we’d all be rocking this parenting gig.
We need more.
And that’s what How to Not Lose Your Sh*t With Your Kids is about. In this book, I’ll draw from the research on brain science, willpower, habit change, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and my extensive experience losing my shit and then losing it a little bit less often to walk readers through a variety of ways to a) reduce the likelihood that you will even come close to freaking out, b) calm yourself down when you’re on the brink, and c) move on after the shitstorm has passed so you can reduce the likelihood that it will happen again.
I am thrilled to be partnering with Workman Publishing House on this project. From Sandra Boynton’s Moo Ba LaLaLa to Sharon’s Salzberg’s Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, Workman’s books have been an integral and important part of my parenting experience, and I’m psyched to join the team.
I’ll be sending out exclusive updates and content (along with my usual parenting tips, tricks, and sanity-savers) to folks on my email list, so if you’re ready to learn how to stop losing your shit with your kids less, sign up now!
