Time to Parent: Organizing Your Life to Bring Out the Best in Your Child and You

Professional organizer Morgenstern systematically instructs parents on how to find more opportunities for family time with her proven techniques and real-life experiences. By learning to prioritize and stay away from time and energy traps and “low-value activities,” parents, she promises, can take control of their schedules and achieve balance. Morgenstern addresses the challenge in two sections: “Raising a Human Being: Doing Your P.A.R.T.” focuses on the four core responsibilities of child-rearing (provide, arrange, relate, and teach) and “Being a Human Being: Fueling Your S.E.L.F.” refers to four self-nurturing needs (sleep, exercise, love, and fun), each described and presented with instructive anecdotes about real families’ problems and solutions. Also vital are four time-management skills: “selective perfectionism,” resisting technology’s siren call, making mindful transitions between different child-rearing responsibilities, and delegating. Morgenstern’s clever maximum-minimum-moderate triage system parses time-consuming tasks into three levels of effort (for instance, for a child’s birthday, the maximum-minimum-moderate choices could be, respectively, baking a cake from scratch, buying supermarket cupcakes, and making cupcakes from a mix). Morgenstern successfully demonstrates how the organizational acumen displayed in her previous books can be usefully applied to the all-important job of parenting. (Sept.)