"Just as adults counsel themselves not to do anything that they wouldn’t want reported on the front page of the New York Times, I shouldn’t do anything I wouldn’t want to be featured in an essay displayed on the wall for Parent Night."
I have such a big girlcrush on Gretchen Rubin, and I look forward to updates of The Happiness Project, where she blogs her attempts to follow various tenets of philosophy and faith that relate to being a more joyful human being. Sometimes the things she tackles go beyond herself and into her parenting, like a couple of exchanges about school with her daughter that led her to some realizations about her parenting: first, learning that her daughter described her mornings as beginning with a wakeup song, and then reading an essay the child had written describing her television viewing. In the first case it leads to a positive change--having only sung the wakeup song a few times in reality, Gretchen makes it a part of the daily routine. In the second it leads to the awareness that a habit needs changing.
I don't think Gretchen's advocating that we do things a certain way simply because of how others would perceive them. What I think she's getting at is that we should be parenting in a way that makes us proud, a way we'd be happy to share. Little changes of attitude can go a long way toward making a happier parent, and a happier person.
