motivate your child ACTION PLAN - A Book Review

Parenting is an exhausting endeavor with its challenges and its joys.  Raising children is no small task.  Just look at us.  We figured we'd like to have a go at it ten times over just because we enjoy studying in the trenches so very much.  Parents and children come in all varieties.  There are various personalities, different sets of luggage, personal challenges, family history, genetics, and a slew of other factors that come together to form our own, unique family makeup.  Gone are the days of June and Ward Cleaver with their cookie cutter family.  Families rarely look the same anymore.  I know ours is anything but ordinary.

Motivate Your Child ACTION PLAN written by Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller, RN, BSN is a followup book to their previously reviewed at The Zoo Crew book simply titled Motivate Your Child published by National Center for Biblical Parenting.  I was originally drawn to this book and its teachings because it fits so very well with our goal to raise these three currently under our tutelage to be motivated, self-sufficient, young people, and later adults, with a love for God, family, and community.  We are more thoughtful of our parenting style and technique now than we ever were with the seven that went before them.  Let's just say we learned a lot, and there is a lot to say about giving some forethought and prayerful consideration to just what it is we are doing under this title we wear called parent.

In Motivate Your Child we learn about parenting to the heart of our children.  We are introduced to the conscience and the importance of helping our children to develop a strong one.  Despite its ability to stand alone as a wonderful parenting tool Motivate Your Child ACTION PLAN is a perfect companion for the original Motivate Your Child.  It's written in a workbook style with short chapters that focus on a specific area and task.  I have this aversion to writing in books, so I started a text file on my computer and am working through the book that way.  The chapters are simple to read and easy to follow.  What may take you some time though are the action items.  Though the concepts and given tasks are simple in their stating and ideas, the actual process of carrying them out can elicit some emotion and require some soul searching.

In our family we are working through some big stuff.  Life has thrown some major hurdles at us, and we are making wonderful emotional progress.  It can be the toughest for our soon to be ten-year-old.  As most of you know, she is our granddaughter, and we are legal guardians to her and her younger sister who is four.  They have been with us for nearly three years.  For the young one the transition has been more natural, but the soon to be ten-year-old has had to unpack some baggage.  She's come a long way, and we've come a long way with her.  Talk about feeling like you're traveling unfamiliar terrain wearing a blindfold!  Praise God we've had some wonderful support from more wise than us people perfectly planted in our lives at the precise moment they were needed.  Motivate Your Child and Motivate Your Child ACTION PLAN are just two more resources in the perfectly timed support system in which we have been blessed.

When I finished reading the first book back in January I have to admit that I was a tad frustrated.  I had all this wonderful information that I agreed with wholeheartedly, but I lacked the tools necessary to know just what to do with this information.  I was super excited for the opportunity to review this follow up book with its 12 audio presentations, one for each chapter.  With our family dynamics, and my one deaf ear, listening to or watching anything for informational purposes can be quite challenging.  It's just not my time in this department.  Quiet?  Seriously?  You have that in your home?  I did manage to listen to the first one (well, most of it), and it is nice to hear the authors elaborate on the content of the chapter.  I can see where this resource will be beneficial to many.  Maybe I can benefit from it at a later date, like when my kids are all 10 and above!

Anyway, I am taking the process of working through this book very seriously.  My main focus is working with the oldest child, but I am already experiencing where what I am learning is carrying over to the other two.  In a way it reminds me of when you commit to morning devotions, and you notice the impact it has in all areas of your life when you stick to the commitment.  This is the same way.  Once I started working on my relationship with my oldest at home, I saw the benefit with most all of my relationships.  It's kind of a mindset thing.  Honestly, I am not as far along in the book as I would like to be at this point, but some things just cannot be rushed.  This is another circumstance where we create better children by becoming better parents ourselves.  Sometimes this means we have to do some serious soul searching and looking within.  It may require a little more time on our knees.  I am dedicated to finishing each part of the book before moving on as I desire to gain as much from this process for myself and my family as I possibly can manage.

Raising children that are secure in who they are with the motivation they require to move on and up in life requires some serious soul work on our part.  I've been around the block enough times now to know that there are no guarantees.  BUT, we can always do our best to lay the strongest possible foundation for our children to lift off from.  What they do with it is their own choice, and I pray that working through the Motivate Your Child ACTION PLAN will equip me with more relevant strategies to assist my children in the growing process so that they can develop a strong conscience and a healthy motivation to be all that God has planned for them to be.

If you purchase your copy of Motivate Your Child ACTION PLAN on or before May 31st you can receive 25% off the cover price.  By using the promo code AP5BGT you will receive an ADDITIONAL $5 off for a grand total of $15 off the cover price!

Motivate Your Child - Book Review

Parenting seems to be an area of perpetual growth for me.  How to parent more effectively isn't really something I thought I'd be thinking about at this stage in the game.  Now was to be a time of exploring subjects that I was interested in learning more about like photography and psychology, or maybe gardening and natural medicine, but certainly not how to be a better, more effective parent.  Well, we all know the old saying, "We make plans, and God laughs".  I'm pretty sure he's had a few good belly-rolls to my credit, and that was just yesterday.  Am I alone on this?

Yes, we have 10 children.  Yes, we made mistakes.  (eh, hem...still make mistakes)  What's different now with these three that remain in our charge than the seven that went before them?  Us.  Simply put, we are different.  Although we found ourselves a little blindsided with the idea of raising not one, but three more children after our, let's just say, prime child rearing years, one gift we've discovered is the gift of conscious decision making and real planning.

If you've been around here any length of time you know that stepping into the big things in life with a plan and an idea of how we'd like things to turn out really isn't what we do around here.  However, with hindsight being 20/20, and stronger faith base present in our lives, books like Motivate Your Child finding their way into our clutches is a little more than happenstance as far as I am concerned.  Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller, RN, BSN, have done a wonderful job equipping parent with the knowledge of the conscience, it's importance in the development of our children, and the relevance it hold in our faith walk.  Despite my becoming more conscious about the way I parent these past five years, I can honestly say that I had never once given thought to helping my children develop a strong conscience.  It just never crossed my mind.

Motivate Your Child is a two-part book written in a practical manner that first addresses the moral development of our children, and then addresses their spiritual development.  The insights given are simply stated, and plenty of real life experiences are present to illustrate the concepts at work in real life families.  What I like most about the real life families is that so many different types of families are represented.  That spoke to my heart.  Often times when we read a book on parenting it seems to be written to the "normal" family.  You know.  That nuclear family with a mom and dad and four children.  Families of all types are represented here, even homeschooling families.  This is something I noticed right away, because we are anything but normal in our makeup.  The fact that step-families, adoptive families, foster families, single parent families, as well as two parent families are all represented indicates to me that the unique challenges faced to each of us do not exclude us from the ability to implement the ideas shared within the pages of this wonderful book.

After reading Motivate Your Child I feel empowered.  Parenting to the heart is something that I've always felt instinctively, but my instincts on how to actually pull this off have been a little faulty.  With the responsibility of ushering three more young people into adulthood I have never taken my role as parent more seriously.  Never before have I known how to so effectively remove myself from the circumstance and not take things so personally.  Never before have I had the tools to empower my children through teaching and discipline.  Praise God I am figuring these things out more and more.  With a book like Motivate Your Child in my tool belt things are certain to continue to improve for my family.  Something that I was taught within the last year is reiterated within these pages, and that is that truly effective parenting begins with disciplining myself.  It seems so simple now that it's out in the open for me, but it really has been a real lesson for me to learn.

My view of my role as a parent has really morphed over the years.  Motivate Your Child is a book that met a lot of my hi-lighter, and I will be sure to reference it time and again as we implement more of what we learned through its teachings.  This resource really fills a gap for me.  I have always struggled with how to impart biblical teaching on the hearts of my children.  Coming up with awesome parables for all of life's circumstances has never been my gift.  BUT, with the teachings on building internal motivation and the promptings of the conscience, as well as the spiritual lessons, I am better equipped now than ever before.  The knowledge imparted through the pages of Motivate Your Child has put me in a better position than ever before to raise thoughtful young people with a strong spiritual walk that see their mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures.  For this I am thankful.