'We Don't Raise Children in a Bubble' ~ Practical Parenting Solutions

Sarah Davis (r) shares a word about modern manners for moms and dads with her co-author Evie Granville of Bedford – Click to view the full-sized image

Evie Granville, M.Ed., Bedford’s most recently published author, already has a huge following on social media through Evie and Sarah.com. Their etiquette advice reaches nearly 600,000 parents and caregivers each month.

Before you even read about her new book, Modern Manners for Moms & Dads: Practical Parenting Solutions for Sticky Social Solutions, you’d be well advised to jump onto YouTube and watch Evie Granville in person. She is an engaging speaker with sensible and reassuring ideas on everyday problems in parenting.

Take the classic “your three-year-old has a meltdown in Target and is screaming for that new toy you have no intention of buying.” What to do? Evie offers advice that bolsters your confidence in making the right decision in a tough moment. Here’s the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJyM-pvepl4. How to deal with this particular incident also appears in the first chapter of the book.

Now that you’ve seen Evie in person, it’s time to talk about the book, which she co-authored with her good friend and podcast partner Sarah Davis, Ed.D. The book is the culmination of more than seven years of blogs and podcasts and it launched officially on October 27. It’s available on Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.

In a recent Instagram posting, Evie describes the excitement when the box of pre-publication books arrived at her house in early October. She tells how she and Sarah met and became friends when their babies were small. Both were living in Virginia at the time. One morning in 2012, after their usual morning exercise routine together, Sarah posed the idea of starting a “Mommy” blog. That initial effort later turned into a blog about the two friends and some of the decisions they’d had to make as parents.

They realized there were no resources on how to help parents balance their needs, their child’s needs, and everyone else’s needs when out in public. This balancing act provided the framework for the book.

As Evie points out, she and her cohort are the first generation to raise their children with social media. Parenting has evolved in ways no one from earlier generations could envision.

How should parents deal with social media? What if well-meaning grandmas insist on posting photos of your little ones on social media? Why is it that some young children can handle a long drawn out dinner party in a restaurant while others meltdown rapidly? What should a parent who is sensitive to the child’s needs as well as to the comfort and needs of those around her do in a situation like this?

Evie and Sarah have honed their parenting perspective over the years and now integrate quizzes, games, interviews with child psychologists, and other experts into their weekly podcasts. They appear frequently on other parenting shows streamed on YouTube.

The idea of doing a book had been germinating for five years, Evie said, beginning when she and Sarah began developing a proposal and looking for a literary agent to represent them. To get the attention of a publisher the authors of a non-fiction work must provide a full description and a completed chapter of the book. Getting to this stage meant years of back and forth between the two writers, who were by then living in different states. All this hard work paid off when Mango, a small, independent publisher in Florida, picked up their title.

Evie describes herself as “growing up in a Greek-American family where etiquette focused on hospitality and overfeeding guests.” She holds a degree in art history from Barnard College and later earned a master’s degree in secondary education from George Mason University. She had real-world experience teaching history to high school students before becoming a stay at home mother with her children.

A relative newcomer to Bedford, relocating here in 2019 from Houston with her husband and two elementary-school-age daughters, Evie is already involved as a member of the Davis School Advisory Council. Co-author Sarah Davis lives in northern Virginia, where the two women originally met as neighbors and mothers of young children. With their complementary educational backgrounds, it was a natural fit to come up with a blog for new parents and then regular weekly Podcasts, which now number nearly 100. The two are often guests on other YouTube-hosted shows where they share their parenting advice.

Here’s a quote from the book to give you a flavor of Evie and Sarah’s take on modern-day parenting: “In the last seven years of motherhood, we’ve lived through sooo many embarrassing and unpredictable parenting situations. And each time, we’d be on the phone with each other, like What the h**l was I supposed to do? Eventually, we realized that having a plan for What to do when… gave us confidence as moms.”

You can catch up with Evie and Sarah in several ways: