When a friend sent a link yesterday to a discussion about parenting yesterday, I sighed. It took me a long time to get around to reading it. Why? Partially because I’m sick of parenting books and blogs. What the nagging advice de jour? Should we be free-range parents or tiger parents? What looming disaster are they warning us about – poor grades, stress, depression, bullying, body piercing, drugs, bad SAT scores? Those books just stress me out.

I also dragged my feet about reading that article, because parenting HAS been tough for the past couple of weeks. I’m trying to create a place for my special needs kid in a school district that is set up for high achieving kids. It’s not easy work.  In the past two weeks, I have set up a list serv for parents of autistic kids in the town, exchanged two dozen e-mails with teachers and administrators, and researched private school options.

Parenting the older dude hasn’t been much easier. In the past two weeks, we’ve dealt with a stomach virus, make up exams, a lost computer file, mid terms, snow days, and placement for honors classes. He’s exhausted, and we’re on a short fuse.

Isn’t raising kids was supposed to be fun? That’s the subject of that article and a new book. So, it is a timely topic. We’ve been batting around this subject a lot this winter.

It is not so important that parenting become fun. It is more important that being a kid is fun. With all the preparation and pressure for Jonah’s midterms, he spent hours and hours in front of his laptop for two weeks. He’s put in longer days than Steve. And he’s only 14. What happened to child labor laws? My 11-year old is under a lot of pressure to pretend that he’s normal. He has a small army of teachers and therapists molding him, while his brain is malleable. He’s made HUGE progress, but he’s tired out. Sometimes he needs to play his video games and talk to himself.

On Saturday, Jonah is going skiing for the day with Steve. That’s Jonah and Steve kind of fun. I’m not pressuring Ian to ski. He doesn’t want to go. Instead, I’ll take him to the mall to see a movie, which is Ian’s kind of fun.

Parenting books, even ones that tell us to have fun, are not fun. I don’t want anybody to tell me what I should be doing better. All parenting books create guilt, and I’m done with it.