Like most new parents, Hillary Frank dove into parenting advice books after her daughter Sasha was born. “I was reading all these books about how to get her to sleep, how to soothe her, how to feed her, and they were all making me feel like I was failing,” she says. “And I was at the most vulnerable time in my life.”

Not only was Frank caring for a newborn, a difficult delivery and recovery had left her nearly confined to her living room for her daughter’s first two months.

Weird Parenting Wins: Bathtub Dining, Family Screams, and Other Hacks from the Parenting Trenches TarcherPerigee

The techniques she was reading about weren’t working for her, and she felt like either she was doing them wrong, or there was something wrong with her or her child. But after a couple of years of parenting, she discovered that what worked best for her didn’t come from books. Her parenting wins came through trial and error, or from moments of desperation.

Frank runs the popular parenting podcast "The Longest Shortest Time", and in 2013 she asked listeners to share parenting techniques that had worked for them. “The results were hilarious,” she says. She interspersed the best tips with essays about her own experiences in parenting in her book, "Weird Parenting Wins: Bathtub Dining, Family Screams, and Other Hacks from the Parenting Trenches".

START WITH SELF-CARE

Parenting well — or doing anything well, really — is almost impossible when you’re exhausted and stressed. Frank’s book includes two chapters, “The Art of Soothing a Screaming Child” and “The Art of Tricking Your Kid into Self-Babysitting” filled with tips for getting some sleep and quiet time in your day.

One of her favorites is this game from Maggie in Lynchburg VA:

Parenting is hardest when you’re sick and just need to lie down, but you have a toddler who hasn’t yet developed empathy and independence. My solution is to come up with games that require me to lie still with my eyes closed. My personal favorite is What’s on My Butt?, which involves the kid finding household objects and putting them on my butt while I lie facedown on the couch. I then have to close my eyes and guess what’s on my butt. It’s a hit: Kids love saying “butt,” and I love naps.

Others involve white lies, like the tip from one parent who has nap/quiet time every day from 1 to 3 p.m. If they are out past 1 p.m. she resets the bedroom clocks to 1 p.m. to guarantee herself two hours of quiet time in her own house every day.

And one parent discovered that the voice behind her car’s GPS soothed her baby to sleep, so she would ask the GPS to recite her contacts list.