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

By Hillary Frank

8 min read

Why does it matter? Because the parenting advice that made you feel like a failure was designed for a child who doesn't exist.

You did everything right. Read the books, attended the classes, memorized the frameworks. You had a plan. Then the actual child arrived — screaming, refusing, doing exactly none of what the experts promised — and you discovered that preparation isn't the same as readiness.

Hillary Frank learned this the hard way, in the kind of detail no parenting manual will warn you about. But Weird Parenting Wins isn't another book about what you should do. It's a crowdsourced field manual from parents who stopped consulting the experts and started paying attention to what actually worked: a blues song invented in a ski rental line, an improv rule that ended drop-off meltdowns. None of these belong in any how-to book, and that's why they work. Kids usually aren't resisting the thing itself; they're resisting the frame around it. Change the frame, and you're already halfway done.

Every Parenting Book Was Written for a Child Who Doesn't Exist

It's 2 AM. Her husband Jonathan is unconscious on the couch with a fever. Hillary Frank is alone with Sasha, who is clearly starving but screaming instead of nursing. Jonathan called it her "Fay Wray scream." Frank digs through her breastfeeding handouts. Nothing. She'd read the books, taken the hospital classes, memorized Dr. Harvey Karp's five S's — swaddling, positioning, shushing, swinging, and sucking — a formula that promised to soothe any bawling newborn. She'd tried all five. They mostly hadn't worked.

What the books had promised: a euphoric natural childbirth, immediate nursing, the baby sleeping in her room that first night. What actually happened: pain so severe she couldn't stand to be touched, labor stalled for half a day, a small dose of a labor-inducing drug triggering contractions so savage she begged for an epidural. Her baby, positioned wrong in the womb, couldn't be born without an episiotomy. Then the baby inhaled her own first bowel movement in utero and spent three days in the NICU, wired to machines — no nursing, no rooming-in. The two things the books had declared non-negotiable.

The stitches burst after she got home. Resurgery. Two months on an air mattress in a dark living room, unable to walk or sit without agony, unable to change diapers or carry her daughter. Because she hadn't pumped at the hospital, her milk supply ran low, so every feeding required three rounds: breast, then pumped milk, then formula.

Back at 2 AM, something worse: a surge of rage so sudden and complete that she nearly threw her daughter across the room. She put Sasha in the bassinet and walked away. It was the most frightening thing she had ever felt toward herself.

That chain of logic felt coherent because the books had built it. Parenting advice is structured as cause and effect: follow these steps and get this result. When the result doesn't appear, the only conclusion is that you applied the steps wrong. The books are correct; you failed. This is how prescriptive advice operates — it describes a hypothetical average child in hypothetical average circumstances, then presents itself as universal law.

Frank's baby wasn't hypothetical. She was Sasha, facing the wrong way, inhaling meconium, refusing to nurse at 2 AM while her father lay sick on the couch. No chapter covers that specific child. Karp's five S's, calibrated for imaginary composite infants, sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. When they didn't, Frank had a name for what followed: the sixth S. Shit out of luck. It sounds like a punchline. It's also a diagnosis: the books were never going to save you, because the books were never written for your child.

Your Child Isn't Being Difficult About the Thing They're Being Difficult About

Surface behavior is almost always a proxy. The thing your child appears to be refusing masks something deeper: a fight over who controls the story, what's novel enough to hold their attention, or who gets to decide. Conventional parenting advice misses this almost universally because it's designed to address the surface complaint — the wrong target.

Hillary Frank ran through every piece of conventional potty-training advice before she understood this. Her daughter Sasha had been through a rough stretch — a broken leg at the playground had triggered months of regression, including a bathtub incident so disturbing that it set her back to near-zero on both bathing and toileting. By the time Sasha was approaching her third birthday, Frank had tried timers, sticker charts, seat inserts borrowed from friends, and letting her run pantsless around the apartment. Nothing worked. Sasha peed on the couch and the floor without apparent embarrassment. These approaches all assumed the same thing: that Sasha's resistance was about discomfort with the toilet. So they tried to make the toilet less threatening, more rewarding, more routine. But Sasha wasn't scared of the toilet. She was engaged in a quiet argument about who got to decide when she was ready.

The solution was a cheap calendar from a stationery shop. Frank told Sasha it was hers and asked her to circle her own Last Day of Diapers. When the date arrived and enforcement produced a meltdown, Frank revised: Sasha's upcoming birthday became the new target. But it remained Sasha's circle, Sasha's choice. On the morning of her third birthday, Sasha ran into her parents' room and announced she was ready. They sealed the last diaper box with packing tape and carried it to the attic. She didn't even need night diapers.

Authorship.

The Fastest Way to Win a Power Struggle Is to Stop Having It

Ari is standing in a Chicago preschool doorway, and his daughter Noa is about to cry. Every morning, the same scene: she clings, protests, eventually goes in — but not without the kind of wrenching goodbye that leaves a parent second-guessing themselves on the drive home. He tries giving her a choice. Happy goodbye or sad goodbye? She is, by his own account, the kind of kid who commits to her choices. She picks sad goodbye. He figures he's made it worse.

Then he remembers improv. The rule is "yes, and": you take what's offered and build on it instead of blocking. So instead of walking back the offer, he gives her exactly what she asked for. Sad goodbye. But with one adjustment: he'll be the sad one, and she'll be the one who tells him to leave.

The first time, he stands in the doorway sobbing, arms outstretched, while Noa plants her small hands on his legs and shoves. The other children watch, baffled. Noa shoves harder. Within weeks she's requesting sad goodbyes with genuine enthusiasm, and the actual problem — the clinging, the crying — has disappeared entirely.

What Ari understood, whether he named it or not, is that Noa wasn't afraid of being at school. She was afraid of being the one who got left. The power in a goodbye belongs to whoever walks away. By handing her that position, becoming the one who reached and pleaded while she dismissed and directed, he gave her something no amount of reassurance could have produced: the experience of controlling the story. The boundary held (she was still going to school). The sadness she'd asked for was still present. But the structure of the fight had dissolved. She was already winning. There was nothing left to resist.

You have more leverage than you think: they're not fighting the behavior. They're fighting for the story.

The Same Imagination That Invents Monsters Can Be Turned Against Them

But not every resistance is a power struggle. Some of what looks like defiance is just fear — and fear can't be won through leverage.

Imagine trying to talk someone down from a dream while they're still inside it. The argument might be airtight — "that thing can't hurt you, it isn't real" — but it can't land, because inside the dream, the rules are different. The dreamer's not confused — they're in a different world with different rules. And you can't argue your way in.

That's the situation parents face with childhood fear. The clearest example comes from one household in Montclair, New Jersey. A toddler who refused to leave the bath gave his parents a simple problem, so they invented a simple solution: the Water Monster. The sucking, gurgling noise a drain makes when you pull the stopper became a creature who'd swallow you if you weren't out in time. The child believed it completely. Of course he did. He'd been told all day by the same adults that cardboard boxes become spaceships, that the Tooth Fairy flies in at night, that Santa arrives through chimneys. A water monster fit right into that world.

It worked until it didn't. The playful prod became genuine terror. Every bath ended with the child shrieking when the stopper was pulled, convinced something monstrous was surging up through the pipes. His parents had entered his imaginative framework to solve one problem and accidentally furnished it with a monster.

Explaining that drains are just drains would have lost. Instead, the family convened a ceremony around the empty tub: a solemn nonsense incantation from his stepfather, then a ceremonial pour of cough syrup down the drain. Everyone stood witness. The Water Monster, touched by ritual, became the Friendly Water Monster: a gentle presence who'd remind the boy it was time to get out and promise to see him again tomorrow.

What logic couldn't reach, ritual could. The child's terror had the same source as his original compliance: imagination. You can't argue your way out of that terrain. You have to add to the story until it points somewhere better. The same framework that made the monster made the cure.

The Same Logic That Ends Tantrums Can Rebuild a Marriage After Trauma

During a hurricane in October 2012, with transformers exploding outside and century-old trees ripping from sidewalks, Hillary Frank spread blankets on her living room floor, made a fire, and tried to talk herself into having sex for the first time in years.

The backstory required three years and five doctors to reach that floor. An episiotomy that burst open a week after delivery and was restitched. Pain so severe that watching a stranger stroke his date's neck at the theater made her want to scream. Five doctors offering solutions ranging from useless to alarming: another cut, another baby, estrogen cream, testosterone cream that might cause facial hair, a skin graft, and one doctor's verdict that she was, in his words, "not anatomical." She'd spent those years as the competent, functional person her daughter needed — feeding, cleaning, teaching a small person manners. Everything warm and flirty had gone dormant.

What unlocked her wasn't a decision. It was a storm that knocked out the power, moved her daughter's mattress to the bedroom floor, and collapsed ordinary deliberation into something simpler. Lying beside her husband while the city outside was doing its worst, she found a different internal argument than the one she'd been running. Not: this has to happen. But: if a tree doesn't flatten me tonight, maybe one more doctor is worth trying. The direct approach — pushing through pain, resolving to perform, muscling past the fear — had produced three years of nothing. The storm, an oblique entry point she couldn't have planned, cracked something open.

Two months later, a fifth-opinion vulvar surgeon squeezed the tenderest spot and knew in under a minute what four doctors had missed in three years: a neuroma, nerves tangled in scar tissue, among the most common post-surgical injuries there is. He treated it, sent her home with lube samples and precise instructions for her husband, and the problem that had defined her marriage slowly began to resolve.

The Sixth S Was Always the Point

There's a coda Frank can't shake. One of her students — she'd taught journalism before the book, and had been mentoring this particular kid for years — called her classroom phone mid-lesson, voice urgent, announcing a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. He knew exactly which levers to pull: her New York roots, her catastrophism, her reporter's need to know. She was completely undone before she figured out it was him. The lesson is uncomfortable. Every technique in this book works because you paid close attention to a specific person. The problem is that attention runs both directions. The better you learn to read your child, the more you're teaching them to read you. These hacks aren't a manual. They're a disposition: stop fighting the hypothetical child and start working with the actual one. Do that long enough, and one day they'll know exactly where you're vulnerable. That's not a failure. That's the whole thing working.