I let my kids watch videos on their iPads for hours and don't force them to eat vegetables. They're thriving and I'm way less anxious.

• Traditional parenting advice to entertain and manage kids excessively made me anxious.

• Letting go of screen time limits and not forcing vegetables made my household more manageable

• Giving my children autonomy has allowed them to excel, even without strict rules.

When my daughter was a baby, I called my mother and told her how much she was crying. She was two months old.

"She's probably bored," my mother said.

Bored? Two-month-olds can get bored, I wondered to myself. Immediately, I became hyper-fixated on how to entertain someone that can barely see 12 inches from their face. My anxiety grew as I found myself getting buried in the "keep kids busy" rhetoric, a concept rich in the logical fallacy of the slippery slope and yet so deeply ingrained in our culture that we often brand mothers as lazy if they aren't killing themselves to entertain their children.

What I know now is that she cried because she was a baby. And the way you get your baby to stop crying is to wait — years — for them to grow up.

Nearly all the parenting advice I received, whether it was about getting my baby to eat, speak, sleep, or crawl, centered on this idea that I was doing something wrong, and if I just did this magical thing, which usually involved buying something, everything would be okay.

It was never okay

I have long since stopped following any of this advice that I consider borderline bullying. My daughter is now 10 and my son is 7. As they edge closer to their teens, my parenting mantras are now "keep them on your side" and "just don't yell."

To do this, I buy expensive clothing they quickly outgrow, I don't make them eat vegetables, and I don't lecture them. I also let them quit extracurriculars they no longer enjoy and stay on their iPad watching inane videos for hours. And you know what? They're both okay, they're better than okay. They are both at the top of their class and their test scores are off the charts. Their teachers obsess over them and they are generally happy and eccentric and a joy to be around.

Here is some traditional parenting advice I followed until I realized it was causing my family more harm than good:

Start potty training at 2

I caused years of emotional and mental turmoil for my daughter — and myself — by trying to potty train her before she was ready. Had I just waited a year (or even two) she would have surely figured it out, but my ego and inexperience drove me to believe we needed to accomplish this arbitrary standard of potty training her at 2 years old.

I was so scarred by our experience that when it came to my son, I just didn't do it. I didn't potty train. I just waited for him to be ready. When the time came for him, very little training was necessary. He wasn't stressed and neither was I.

Encourage a variety of foods

As if all of us adults are out there eating a rainbow palette of Swiss chard and eggplant, trying to get little kids who have spent most of their lives consuming milk and the mush that is baby food takes some real audacity.

I must have bought every cleverly-marketed box in the frozen food section that promised to sneak superfoods into my kids' mouths via the shape of a star or a dinosaur before realizing that this was, in fact, fruitless. If I didn't want to eat this, why should I make them?

When I gave up searching for vegetables everyone liked, a tangible weight lifted off all of us. Instead focused on eating my own healthy meals in front of them without muttering a word. Eventually, their palates grew. They now eat avocado toast, tomato sandwiches, spinach pasta, and roasted broccoli with abandon. It just took something I didn't always have — patience.

Limit screen time

I spent whole swaths of my childhood sitting cross-legged in front of a Sega Genesis and I don't regret a minute. It was a beautiful era where I didn't have to pay bills, schedule oil changes, or read on a screen about how bad screen time is.

My children are so well-informed, so aware, so intrigued by the world, and a lot of that has to do with their screens. Screens have been so vilified that we forget they can also be world-opening. Once, driving in the car, I heard my son say softly to himself as he gazed out the window that, "things just haven't been the same since the Industrial Revolution." He was 4. I'm pretty sure this was not part of his preschool curriculum, but likely due to his penchant for watching videos of Lego Minifigures acting out historical events.

If you were to look at how much time my children spend on an iPad each day, it surely surpasses the recommended amount, but that is because one of my daughter's favorite activities is to lounge in a beanbag chair, eat pickles, and read e-books and every night she falls asleep listening to an audiobook. I have no doubt this is why she is in the gifted class at her school.

Sometimes, kids do know best

Now, the only people I pose questions to about my kids are my actual kids. Want to play basketball this year? Yes? Great. Want to do anything this weekend? No? Perfect. Me either. Do you want cola and French toast for breakfast? Yes? Okay. Cool. Me too.

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