If you’ve ever picked up a magazine at the pediatrician’s office, you know that the glossies are full of parenting tips and advice.

Five Simple Steps to Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night!

Top Ten Ways to Raise a Happy Child!

Magazine editors love bullet points, solutions, and sound-bytes.  They know how to play on parental anxieties, consulting “experts” with the latest research, promising to help us with the overwhelming task of parenthood.

But here’s the rub: advice articles may move magazines, but they don’t usually make us feel good. For me, they inevitably inspire feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  My favorite parenting columnist, Joanna Weiss of The Boston Globe, recently observed in her Op-Ed, “Parental Bliss, or Lack Thereof“:

“The Internet and bookstores are loaded with parenting advice, as if childrearing is a set of problems to be solved, instead of a set of experiences, good and bad.”

Summer days with my kids encompass a range of experiences, from the sublime (snuggling in the hammock) to the grotesque (stepping on a huge turd in the kiddie pool).  I’ve never wanted to write an advice column.  Who am I to tell others how to raise their children, when I’m just figuring it out as I go along?  But on a journalistic whim, I decided to poll my friends and neighbors, eschewing parenting experts for real, live, imperfect moms and dads.  It turns out their insights may help us all relax.

“What Tricks of the Trade do you have up your sleeve?”  I asked.

“Movies, candy, bribery…” replied one friend, a Brattleboro father of two.

“Bribery, Benadryl, letting my children sleep in my bed,” laughed Sarah, a Washington D.C. mother of two (ages 2 and 5).  Then she added, “Watch your kids sleeping.  Even after the worst day, it’s impossible not to love them when they’re asleep.”

“Never battle over clothing,” said Leah, maternity nurse and mother of two boys (ages 7 months and 4 years).  “Let them wear what they want to wear, as long as they’re warm enough.  Once Sammy wore his Spiderman tights for two weeks straight.”

“Let your kids get dirty and wet.  You can always clean them up later,” recommended Orly, third-grade teacher and mom of two (ages 2 and 5).

“Read Confessions of a Slacker Mom.  It’s the one book that, philosophically speaking, helped me the most,” advised Andrea, a video producer for The Washington Post and tireless mother of three boys, ages 4, 6, and 8.

“Never read advice books,” countered my friend Amy, a physician in California and mom of two girls, ages 5 and 7.  Amy also told me she’d recently made a parenting resolution:  she’s not going to yell at her kids anymore.  When I expressed dismay at my own loud tactics and admiration for her lofty goal, she said, “Yelling has become the new hitting.  In the moment it feels like life or death.  But what would it mean to actually stop?  I decided I’m not going to let myself get that mad.”  So far, she’s made it three weeks.

“I’m not afraid to tell my kids that I need a break,” said Eileen Parks, librarian and mother of two (ages 7 and 9).  “My kids understand the word FRIED.  I have no guilt about telling them to get lost, so I can lie down and slip into a Mom-Coma for 10 or 15 minutes.  Just enough to dip into some REM and renew.”

I rely on the Mom-Coma myself most afternoons.  I also give myself Time-Outs whenever I feel my temper building.  And instead of pajamas, I dress the girls in clean clothes before bed.  (Sometimes it saves a step in the morning, though my two-year-old usually goes through several clothing changes before breakfast regardless).

Maybe some of these tips will work for you.  Or maybe not.  As one grandmother of nine put it, even after four decades of childrearing,  “How can I give advice?  It’s all so individual.  It depends on the child, the parent, the family.”

I like getting a long-term perspective on parenting, receiving the wisdom of the older generation.  These days, I try to remember one grandfather’s bittersweet words: “Relax and have fun with it.  If I could do it all over, I would have played more and worried less.”

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