What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be together? Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his wife and daughters on a journey around the world to learn what it takes to be a family. Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and, when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family--Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters--could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny book, the fractious, loving Kois family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside their East Coast parenting bubble. How To Be A Family brings readers along as the Kois girls--witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper--hike through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes through the pouring rain to their Dutch school, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places works the way it does. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, How To Be A Family will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.