When she focused on parenting, Rubin tried to adopt a policy of underreacting to situations. "I also found that underreacting to little household accidents made them less irritating, because after all, they were only as annoying as I allowed them to be," she wrote. "When [her daughter] Eliza raced into the kitchen to say, 'I didn't mean to, it was an accident... but, well, a bottle of purple nail polish spilled on my carpet. It fell off a shelf and the top was off,' I didn't leap to my feet to yell, 'Why was a bottle of nail polish sitting open on a shelf?' or 'You're eleven years old! Don't you know how careful you need to be with nail polish?' or 'Why do we even own purple nail polish?' Instead, I calmly went to her room, told her to look for stain removal suggestions on the Internet, looked at the stain, and then spent a few minutes scrubbing it.... She looked relieved that she wasn't in trouble, and I'd spared myself a session of pointless anger."
