Book Review: Grace Based Parenting

I'll confess, I have read 20 books on parenting. No kidding. I have searched and searched for the right book to fix my kids. ;) What I didn't realize was that I was the one in need of being fixed! If you haven't read my post, "My Journey to Grace" you can read about why I say this there as well as more specifics about Grace-Based Parenting.

Thank you Mr. Kimmel for writing such a beautiful book. I am truly indebted to you as is my entire family. As I, by the power of Christ, become a grace-based person and therefore a grace-based parent, I am confident it will not only affect my boys but generations to come.

There are times when the best way to review a work is simply let it speak for itself. Here are just a few of my favorite passages from Grace-Based Parenting.

Grace-based parents spend their time entrusting themselves to Christ. They live to know God more. Their children are the daily recipients of the grace these parents are enjoying form the Lord. If you watch them in action, they appear to be peaceful and very much in love with God. They are especially graceful when their children are hardest to love. Their advice to their children would be a mixture of:

• " You are a gift from God ; go make a difference."
  
• "You may struggle doing the right thing sometimes but you're forgiven." ~ p. 19

[If you operate from a standpoint of grace] Your children will be the daily recipients of the number one characteristic of God that has drawn people to Him since the Creation. ~p. 22

If God our heavenly Father is the perfect Father, and the primary way that He deals with us as humans is through the power of His grace, it stands to reason that grace forms the best template for bringing out the best in our own children. ~p. 28

The reason grace makes the most sense as a bottom line for parenting is because of grace's eternal appeal to the human heart. ~p. 29

Let's define what we mean by secure love. This is a steady and sure love that is written on the hard drive of children's souls. It's a complete love that they default to when their hearts are under attack. It's the kind of love that children can confidently carry with them into the future. ~p. 46

Grace can't be some abstract concept that you talk about in your home. It has to be a real-time action that ultimately imprints itself on your children's hearts. ~p. 140

They [children] need parents who remain calm, spend time on their knees, and maintain an open forum where their children can work through their faith out loud. ~ p. 186

Grace provides equilibrium for a family. Where too many parents are concerned with how others view their children, grace-based parents are more excited with how God views their children. Grace-based parents avoid the silly preoccupations with arbitrary standards devised by evangelical busybodies. They keep their eye on the bubble in the level, which is their children's character. To them, keeping their children balanced when it comes to their faith, integrity, poise, discipline, endurance and courage makes more sense than worrying about whether others thing their children look spiritual enough (whatever that means). They don't make it a crime for their children to be different, to be oddballs, or to boogie to a different drumbeat. In the process, they encourage their children to find the unique individual that God designed them to be through an intimate and authentic relationship with Christ...These families are overseen by shrewd mothers and fathers who see their children's fragile features as opportunities for God's power to shine through them. ~p. 212

Grace-based parenting is not a checklist for parenting; it's a lifestyle. It's a clear attempt to retrofit your minds to respond to your children in the same way God responds to you. ~p. 213

The grace-based home assumes kids will struggle with sin and helps them learn how to tap into God's power to help them get stronger...When their children do sin, grace-based parents don't get surprised. They expect it. They assume sin is an ongoing dilemma that their children must constantly contend with. ~p. 216

I can't wait to read this book again...and again...and again!

A Book Review: Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World

Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World by Jeffrey Freed and Laurie Parsons is the best book I have ever read on the subject of ADD/ADHD. It provides not only help but hope! So many of the things Thatcher does that most people, including myself, have always found quirky to downright irritating are actually common in the world of right brained learners (which Thatcher tested very strongly in the checklist given by the author). In describing ADHD children it was as if Mr. Freed had been a fly on the wall in our living room for years.

The child with genuine ADD typically has just two speeds: full tilt and collapse. He consistently has a short attention span, which means he fails to hold a thought for more than a few seconds. He rarely finishes a task, bouncing like a pinball from one activity to another. He doesn't have a built-in "brake" in his brain that tells him to look before he leaps. His lightning-fast visual mind flashes from random thought to random thought; his thought patterns are like a brain storming session run amok. He is nonlogical, nonsequential and nonverbal (although he talks constantly), physically and socially clumsy, and hopelessly disorganized. He may or may not respond well to medication. Rather than being labeled as ADD, this child might be more accurately termed a "hyperimpulsive random visual processor." Whatever you choose to call it, it's a tremendous challenge to parent and teach this kind of child.

p. 25-26

Amen, Mr. Freed! As a mom I have always known "what" Thatcher did but not always the "why" behind the "what". After reading this book I feel I truly know my child so much better - what makes him tick and how to get inside his head (and subsequently his heart!). I also learned that I am a strong left-brained learner which has been a cause of much of my frustration. He learns so much differently than myself and the things the author explains I don't know that I ever would have figured out on my own.

The author describes how he believes many children are moving towards being visual learners due to our culture and society. Unfortunately schools have not kept up, teaching largely the way they did for the past 100 years - primarily to auditory learners. These methods made sense in a world pre-television, pre-computer and pre-picture books where the predominate means of communication was auditory: radio, literature readings and oral story telling. Today children's brains are different and require new teaching methods. He believes that many children (if not most) who are labeled ADD/ADHD are actually visual learners who are simply having a difficult time coping in a classroom not geared towards their learning style. He believes that only 2-3% of the population are true ADD kiddos and the remainder are pseudo-ADD. They way to tell the difference is to examine, "the degree of severity" and "whether the behavior is pronounced both inside and outside the classroom."

Whether or not your child is true ADD or what he terms "pseudo-ADD" you can greatly benefit from this book. After making his case that ADD is a "learning style" he lays how to work with children who demonstrate these characteristics in a chapter titled "Ground Rules for Working with the ADD Child" and then follows up by walking though each subject one by one describing specific techniques to help these children attain success.

If you have a child you suspect of being ADD/ADHD (the author uses these terms interchangeably) this would be a great book to add to your reading list. Beware that he is a little harsh on the public school system and public school teachers. He makes a lot of generalizations and remember that there are always exceptions (although in my experience teaching ps for seven years many of his statement are true). Also, this book is not just for homeschooling parents, although he does hold a favorable view of homeschooling. He devotes a few chapters at the end of the book to helping parents help their child(ren) have a more positive experience in the public/private school system.

Deconstructing Penguins: A Review

One among many homeschooling goals I have is to help my children become thinkers: to be able to engage a book, movie, lecture or any other aspect of culture and discerningly embrace the good, noble and redeemable from that which is false or ungodly. I realize this road I desire to lead my children down is one I have just begun to journey myself as I was not given these tools in my education.

I was your typical memorize and regurgitate the facts kind of kid. I would figure out just what the teachers wanted from me in order to get the grade I desired, and unfortunately thinking was rarely a part of the equation. Specifically, when it came to reading I was typically given a book and then asked to do a report or answer a series of basic comprehension questions – again, no real thinking, just spitting out facts.

In comes Desconstructing Penguins: Parents, Kids and the Bond of Reading. This book is an account of the authors’ experiences leading literature discussion groups with second through fourth graders at their local library. In these groups they taught the participants (and through them, now us) how to determine the protagonist and antagonist, analyze the setting, identify the climax and ultimately to discover the hidden meaning in a book. And all this was done with seven through nine year olds! In addition they showed the children how to “grade” the author: Did s/he achieve his/her objectives and did they break any rules doing so? There is also a wonderful chapter (possibly my favorite) on poetry.

I learned these terms (protagonist, antagonist, climax, setting…) in school and probably was even tested over the material in a “match the word to its definition kind of way”. Unfortunately, I was never taught that most books (at least most good ones) have great underlying themes that I could discover on my own using these elements as a type of road map. I thought the protagonist was simply the good guy and the antagonist the bad guy, and the main significance of the setting was to identify what genre of literature I was reading. After reading this book I feel much better prepared to walk my children a little farther on down the road to becoming real thinkers and I will be journeying right along beside them!

If you could use some help teaching your children how to do real and meaningful literature analysis then read Desconstructing Penguins! You won’t be sorry. Also, leave a comment if you have other books you can recommend that would help me on my journey to become a thinker. I’d love to add a few to my wishlist for Christmas. Next, I'll be reading Mortimer Adler's classic, How to Read a Book.

A Book Review: The Jesus Storybook Bible

This is the most beautiful Children's Bible I have ever seen - both for its illustrations and, more importantly, its content. I sat at my desk and wept as I read the first five stories.

Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules,
telling you what you should and shouldn't do.
The Bible certainly does have rules in it.
They show you how life works best.
But the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you should be doing.
It's about God and what he has done.

-Chapter One, The Story and the Song (emphasis mine)

How refreshing in the increasingly me-centered world we find ourselves inhabiting. The premise, and what makes this Children's Bible altogether different from others, is that God's redemptive plan is woven in each and every story, continually pointing your child to Christ as ultimate Redeemer! The subtitle of the book itself is "Every story whispers his name."

Here are the endings of two stories which illustrate this truth-

A Giant Staircase to Heaven: The Tower of Babel concludes:

You see, God knew, however high they reached,
however hard they tried,
people could never get back to heaven themselves.
People didn't need a staircase; they needed a Rescuer.
Because the way back to heaven wasn't a staircase; it was a Person.
People could never reach up to Heaven,
so Heaven would have to come down to them.
And, one day, it would.

The final paragraph of The Present: The Story of Abraham and Isaac:

Many years later, another Son would climb another hill,
carrying wood on his back.
Like Isaac, he would trust his Father and do what his Father asked.
He wouldn't struggle or run away. Who was he?
God's Son, his only Son - the Son he loved.
The Lamb of God.

If you are interested in seeing more, click on the photo and it will take you to Westminster Bookstore's webpage. There you can read more reviews (much more eloquently stated than mine) and even download a pdf that shows two full stories: David's Anointing by Samuel and John the Baptist. You can see for yourself if this Bible might be something you will want to include in your family's library. I am so glad it has found its way into ours!