Permission to stop performing
You do not have to be the recreation director of your own household. The most useful thing the Alcotts ever did was get bad at entertaining their kids — and watch what grew in the space they stopped filling.
Parenting · Quari Editions · a field guide$30 first edition
Raise interesting kids,not just well-adjusted ones.
The parenting books tell you how to raise well-adjusted children. This one tells you how to raise interesting ones — which, in our experience, takes a different set of instructions.
Demo storefront — not a real purchase.
exhibit athe bookno. 1parking-lot pebble
no. 4hand-drawn map
no. 3a beetle, retired
— the premise —
Weird, in the fullest sense, means having a genuine inner life.
It means caring about things for reasons that are your own. It means, when someone asks what you’re interested in, having an actual answer. That’s the strange we’re raising toward — not strange as outsider, not strange as difficulty. Strange as alive.
— what this book is for —
The case for raising kids who areweird on purpose.
A defense of boredom
Boredom is where the interesting stuff starts. Not scheduled unstructured time — the real, uncomfortable kind a child has to metabolize and make something from. This book teaches you to hold your ground through the unpleasant middle.
Comfort with not knowing
The job isn't having the answers. It's the willingness to say “I have no idea, let's find out” — and to sit with questions about parking-lot geology, or whether fish have preferences, that don't resolve quickly, or at all.
Honesty instead of a unified theory
Written by two parents who genuinely disagree, and left the contradictions in. Because parenting is mostly improvised, and a book that pretends otherwise is selling you something.
— from the introduction —
We weren’t supposed to have the answers. We were supposed to have the willingness to not know, the comfort with ‘I have no idea, let’s find out,’ and the patience to sit with questions that don’t resolve quickly, or sometimes at all.
Raise Them Strange · Introduction
— contents —
Eight honest chapters.
- IOn Boredom11
- IIThe Weird Hobby Problem25
- IIIOn Failure39
- IVThe Questions You Can't Answer53
- VBoredom, Again (It Bears Repeating)67
- VIOn Telling the Truth81
- VIIOn Starting Over in Front of Your Kids95
- VIIIWhat Strange Looks Like When It Grows Up109
— the collection —
A box of strange things, carefully labeled.
Pebbles from a parking lot. A retired beetle. A map to nowhere in particular. The evidence of a kid with a genuine inner life.
no. 1parking-lot pebble
no. 2rusted bottle cap
no. 3a beetle, retired
no. 4hand-drawn map
no. 5one green leaf
— early readers —
For parents who suspected they were doing it wrong.
I finished it and immediately stopped scheduling my daughter's every Saturday. Forty minutes of boredom later she'd built an entire world. They were right.
The first parenting book that didn’t make me feel like I was failing a test. It made me feel like I had permission to relax and pay attention.
Funny, honest, and a little contradictory — exactly like parenting actually is. I underlined half of it and read the parking-lot chapter out loud at dinner.
strange as alive
Stop sanding off the weird.
Give your kid the room to become genuinely, particularly themselves. One-time purchase — yours to keep, dog-ear, and argue with.
Demo storefront — not a real purchase.