Welcome to Parent Hacks

We parents rely on each other for quick, practical advice. Books and magazines are fine, but the real-world perspective of one’s friend, sister, neighbor, or the friend of one’s sister’s neighbor, is often the most helpful.

Parent Hacks is a collaborative website that collects and publishes parents’ tips, recommendations, workarounds, and bits of wisdom – their hacks – in a single pot so we can all partake. Here’s the stuff that would have been left out of the instruction manual...if there were one. We're not experts in the pediatrician-, psychologist-, or teacher- sense. We’re just out there, raising our kids, finding the little tweaks that make this crazy adventure go a little more smoothly.

Much of what you’ll find here will be of the “it worked for me” variety. Every kid’s different in temperament and constitution; apply the gut test to determine if a hack might work for your family.

Parent Hacks is an independent project, but was inspired by the "hacker ethic" behind the O'Reilly Hacks(TM) series of books. Most Hacks books focus on tech topics, but the same experimental, tinkerer's approach applies to parenting. O'Reilly defines a hack as "a clever solution to an interesting problem." Our goal is to give you as many clever solutions as we can.

Who we are

Asha Dornfest, Founder and Publisher
Asha Dornfest has been writing professionally for over ten years. She's written several books about Web publishing, but her most popular book is Microsoft FrontPage For Dummies (Wiley). After her kids were born -- she has an eight year-old son and a four year-old daughter -- she began writing about the endlessly fascinating and confounding details of parenthood. Her work has appeared in a number of print and online publications.

Adrienne Jones, Contributor
Adrienne is an avid reader, furloughed academic, and geek mom to a toddler son with engineering tendencies. When not exploring the Midwest, she writes Baby Toolkit (tips, tactics, and gear reviews).

Heather Petit (hedra), Contributor
Heather has been a professional writer for more than a decade, though most of her work is of a technical nature. In the parenting world, she has been a contributor to a variety of parenting-related books, usually as a panelist (The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby, by Ann Douglas, for example). She is working on a manuscript exploring a practical philosophy of motherhood, but the book took a back seat after her third and fourth children (twins) were born. To take up some of the 'writing compulsion,' hedra posts online to a few parenting blogs and message boards, and is still grateful to her husband for pointing her toward Parent Hacks. At the moment, most of her life is consumed by working 'sort of full time', parenting four children (9 1/2, 5 1/2, 2 1/2, 2 1/2), supporting the professional development of her husband (architectural designer), and staying as involved as time will allow with school, family, and social commitments.

Money, or lack thereof

You may have noticed ads embellishing our site and peppering our RSS feed, and links to Amazon.com and other affiliate partners sprinkled throughout. Fees from these services help offset our hosting fees, our Net connection and our caffeine habit.

We also gratefully accept donations of any size; click the button to be whisked to a secure PayPal site.

If donations aren't your style but you'd still like to support Parent Hacks, we have plenty of suggestions!

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Product reviews

Parent Hacks often talks about products and services we think are exceptional, either in quality, design, or sheer problem-solving functionality. Want to pitch us? Email reviews@parenthacks.com.

We welcome pitches for reviews of products or services, but only respond to those we think would fit with the Parent Hacks vibe. Please forgive our inability to respond to every pitch -- our staff of one had to draw the line somewhere.

We never do any sort of "advertorial" or pay-for-positive reviews. When we do receive pitches and product samples from vendors, we mention it up front.

Fine print

Here are the terms of service and privacy policy, in case you're interested.

Thanks for visiting. Now won't you share a hack?

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