An often light-hearted self-help manual written from a very personal perspective, for parents like me whose kids regularly provoke struggles with their inner Hulk.
(In other words: I wrote the book I wanted to read.)
Get your copy here >
Here’s a quick look inside the book.
You’re not crazy. You’re normal
Just to get this straight from the start: it is absolutely and fundamentally normal for parents to lose their cool, blow their top, and get steamed up because of their children. For one thing, anger is a perfectly natural human response. And for another – for reasons that are explored below – no-one can light the touch papers of temper quite like the under-age person or people sharing your home and answering to the title ‘son’ or ‘daughter’. Which is why your average family home can sometimes be more war zone than comfort zone.
Why kids get our goat
Children have a large number of tendencies and characteristics that are annoying, purely by dint of the fact that they are children. They can be careless, hasty, inquisitive, irrational, over-sensitive, hyper-emotional, whiny, demanding, obstinate, dramatically affected by practical factors such as fatigue or hunger, given to procrastination, and just plain daft.
These are merely drawbacks – along with the huge increase in food bills and laundry, and the annihilation of your social life – that you have to accept when you decide to have a family. (Fortunately, kids also come with a whole load of other, more loveable qualities, which balance their more ‘challenging’ traits. And also, being the fruit of our loins, we tend to instinctively forgive them these things, anyway.)
