How to Use This Library

The Parent Book is a library, not a manual. There is no first page you are meant to read, no order you are meant to follow, no chapter at the end where the questions are answered. The publication is a set of resources our clinical practice keeps returning to, organised so that a parent can find what they need in the moment they need it. We do not believe a definitive book on parenting exists. What we have built sits alongside the school, the GP, the family network, and the books that have been by your bed for years.

The library has a small number of kinds of thing in it. Each does a different job.

Chapters are the long-form. Each one is a piece of writing on one situation parents bring to our therapy rooms most often: the friendship that has ended, the conversation that keeps being put off, the body that has begun to feel like a battleground. Read a chapter when you want to give a topic fifteen or twenty minutes and think it through. Most chapters open with the short version, three things that help, for the evening you do not have twenty minutes, and close with the fuller set to take with you.