In this video I’m sharing the one book I recommend to basically all of my mom friends: “Laying Down the Rails” by Sonia Schaefer. It’s honestly one of the most valuable books I own, and I’m constantly pulling it back off the shelf while raising my young kids. Sonia takes all the places Charlotte Mason (a Victorian-era writer on child philosophy and education) talks about habit training and consolidates it, so you don’t have to dig through six volumes to find the practical parts. What I love is that it helps me see how much of life is actually habitual—and how easy it is to let things slip through the cracks and then try to “fix” them later. The book walks through what habits are, how to cultivate good ones, and then breaks it down by categories like decency and propriety, mental habits (attention, imagination, memorizing, observation), moral habits (integrity, obedience, self-control), physical habits, and more. There’s even a section on “repairing the rails” for breaking bad habits—like lying, tantrums, and moody behavior. It is Christian-based because Charlotte Mason was, but I truly think even the most secular person can still get so much wisdom from it. I treat it like a handbook—one of my best tools in my mother tool belt.