General Parenting Tips

Being a Great Dad for Dummies, Australian Edition

Let's face it, parenting is hard work, and any help you can get is great! Take a look at these parenting tips so you can be an effective and happy parent and do it consistently with enthusiasm:

You're not going to do everything right.

When you find you've handled a situation wrong, correct the error, brush yourself off, and try again.
Being a good parent takes time and patience.
Parenting is a series of trials and errors.

You learn from your mistakes. Aside from being consistent, following through, and communicating positively, there are very few definite rules on parenting. You have to find what works for yourself and your children.
Don't give up on your children. Be persistent and keep trying. Your kids need you to be strong.
Have fun with your kids.

The time when your kids just want to sit and play with you is relatively short. Don't lose that time. Play with your kids as much as you can. One day they'll be off running around with their own set of friends and you'll be begging them for their time.
Turn off the TV and read.

Reading, talking, walking, and playing is so much more fun than the mesmerizing effects of the TV.

About This Article

About the book author:

Sandra Hardin Gookin serves as a parenting expert for Parents Magazine and Working Mother Magazine.

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.