Burton, a pediatric behavior specialist with decades of experience, opens her nonfiction debut by acknowledging how challenging parenting can be in the modern world—everything costs more, communities are less extensive and more transient, and social media is full of advice that’s relentless, loud, and often contradictory. “Today’s parents,” she writes, “are substantially overworked, overburdened, and under supported” while dealing with experts and advisers who “try to make parents feel like we have the skill level of newborn lambs wearing roller skates.” The author draws a distinction between conventional parents who are loyal to tradition and “freestyle” parents who are more open to innovation; in these pages, she lays out 21 “practical pathways” that parents can use to shape the responses they want. “The most obvious way parents can steer children’s behavior,” Burton asserts, “is to give clear verbal instructions about our expectations,” but that approach obviously doesn’t always work. This is where the author’s multiple tactics come in, including “auto-responding,” “a form of preconscious, agreeable compliance”; “guided venting,” which is “a process of identifying our children’s underlying physical energy needs and diverting them towards completely different activities we approve of”; and the atonement technique, in which “the goal is for the culprit to acknowledge and offset the harm they’ve caused by taking purposeful action to make the victim feel better.” Burton outlines all of these approaches in clear, forceful prose that’s perfectly suited to harried parents who feel overwhelmed. They’ll greatly appreciate her humane, empathetic approach and lack of ideological rigidity—the author allows that sometimes, despite parents’ best efforts, these tactics will fail. “Sometimes we miscalculate what sort of intervention will help,” she admits. “When the wind changes, it’s time to adjust the sails.”