Asking for a friend. (That friend is me.) I had this whole list of things I was never going to do as a parent. Screen time limits, no eating in front of the TV, always a proper bedtime routine… yeah. That list did not survive contact with actual children 
Curious what rules others quietly let go of. No judgment here, I’m clearly not in a position to judge anyone.
ok so I was absolutely that person who said my kids will never eat in the car 
Year one of parenting: no way. Eating in the car is chaos and I drive a relatively nice vehicle thank you very much.
Year two: occasional snacks, but like, contained snacks. Crackers in a cup. Very controlled.
Year three: my son is eating a full pasta bowl in the back seat and I have stopped caring entirely. There is dried mac and cheese on the door panel that I have accepted as a permanent fixture.
The car is not nice anymore. The car is a dining room now. I am at peace with this.
TBH the moment I stopped fighting it I was way less stressed. Kids are gonna make a mess. The car was always going to lose that battle 
Screen time. Oh my god, screen time.
I had a whole plan. One hour max per day. Educational content only. No devices at the dinner table. No screens before school.
That lasted about four months before the first really bad week hit, I was sick, my partner was traveling, and I had a deadline at work that was not going to move. And you know what saved me? Forty five minutes of Bluey so I could finish one email without someone asking me to open a yogurt pouch.
Now I don’t even track it anymore. And genuinely? My kids are fine. They play outside, they read, they have friends. The screen is just one part of the day, not the whole thing.
I’m still a little annoyed at past me for being so rigid about it. That person had clearly never had a sick day while solo parenting 
Can we talk about the no bribing rule for a second because I held onto that one for way too long 
I used to be so smug about it. I’m not going to negotiate with a toddler. I’m the adult. I set the terms. Lol. LOL. The absolute confidence. Then my daughter decided she was done with the grocery store at aisle four and we still had eleven aisles to go. And I heard myself say the words. If you sit nicely in the cart for ten more minutes you can pick one thing from the bakery.
And it worked. She was an angel for the rest of the trip.
So now I bribe. I bribe freely and without shame. It’s basically a reward system rebranded and every parenting book secretly agrees with me, they just call it positive reinforcement so it sounds less desperate. Same thing. We all know it’s the same thing
@Fluxorix your car situation sent me because I have the same dried pasta situation and I also have made peace with it
Ok so story time because this one still makes me laugh.
My son was about four. We were at my in-laws for a Sunday dinner, the kind where everything is slightly too formal and someone always brings up something awkward. Long day. He was overtired and started melting down around dessert time.
I had sworn…sworn, I would never use my phone as a distraction tool in social situations. It sends the wrong message, I had actually said out loud to my partner once. Very confident. Very naive.
So there I am, forty minutes later, sitting in the hallway outside the dining room with my kid watching a YouTube video about garbage trucks on my phone while the adults finish dinner. Just us. Hallway. Garbage trucks. Peace.
And honestly that ten minute video saved the entire evening. My mother-in-law did not have to witness a meltdown. I did not have to do the awkward early exit. Everyone won.
The rule was wrong. Garbage trucks were right. 
My kids will go to bed at the same time every night, no exceptions.
Reader, there have been many exceptions.
Birthday parties that run late. Camping trips. The one time my daughter got really into a nature documentary about penguins at 9pm and I just… let it happen because she was learning. Technically.
Also @Silicrypte the sick day solo parenting scenario is genuinely the fastest way to dissolve any screen time principle ever. One fever plus one work deadline and suddenly the iPad is your co-parent for the afternoon. No shame in it
I think the thing I’ve realized is that the rules I made before kids were made by someone who had never actually dealt with a tired, hungry, opinionated small human at 8:30pm. Past me was working with incomplete information.
The one I think about most is "I’ll always explain the reason behind every rule.
Which, yes, great in theory. Respectful parenting. Kids understand the why. Totally on board with that.
Except sometimes it’s 7am and I’m trying to get two kids out the door and one of them wants a full philosophical debate about why shoes are required and I just… don’t have the bandwidth for Socrates right now.
So sometimes it’s just because we need to go and I feel mildly bad about it for like three seconds and then we leave and everyone survives.
Mine was I’ll never compare my kids to other kids.
I really meant it. I’d seen how damaging that could be growing up and I was not going to do it.
Then my son started school and the comparisons just sort of… happened in my head. Not out loud, I never said it to him, but I’d notice that the kid next to him in class was reading faster and I’d feel this little spike of worry. And then I’d feel bad for feeling worried. And then I’d feel bad about feeling bad. It’s a whole thing.
I think the rule I actually needed was not never compare but never use comparison as a weapon. Noticing differences is human. Using them to make your kid feel small is the actual problem.
Still working on this one honestly. It’s less about breaking the rule and more about understanding why I made it in the first place 
No McDonald’s.
…
Anyway 
(in my defense it was a long road trip and everyone needed a win and the fries are genuinely very good)
This whole thread is making me feel so much better about my life choices
Mine was no TV in the bedroom. Had that one locked in for years. Then my kids got a little older, started having different sleep schedules, and we got a small second TV so one of them could watch something quietly while the other one slept. And now I cannot imagine going back.
@AgileShow I think the thing nobody tells you before you become a parent is that the rules you make beforehand are basically fiction. You are writing them without any of the actual data, you don’t know your specific kid yet, you don’t know your specific situation, you don’t know what a Tuesday at 6pm actually feels like when everyone is tired and hungry.
The rules that survive are the ones that still make sense once you have that data. The ones that don’t survive were probably just ideas that sounded good pre-kids.
No shame. We all had the list. The list always loses 