MomReviews

Now here’s a concept that might seem radical-NOT wanting your kids to “just be happy”. Well-meaning parents take charge of every aspect of their children’s lives, including interactions with friends and teachers, wanting to shield their children from getting hurt or disappointed, but what does that teach them? Aaron Cooper, Ph.D. & Eric Keitel, M.Ed reveal what parents should be focusing on in I Just Want My Kids to Be Happy! Why You Shouldn’t Say It, Why You Shouldn’t Think It, What You Should Embrace Instead, available in paperback now.

I’ve been guilty of being a “helicopter parent” myself, but the concepts outlined in this book made a lot of sense to me. If your child comes home upset because they got a bad grade, and you call the teacher and demand the grade be changed, you haven’t taught your child how to handle disappointment. When they complain that so and so isn’t their friend anymore, they don’t want us to call so and so’s parents to try to work it out, they just want us to listen. As hard as it is for us as parents, sometimes all our kids need is for us to listen while they talk, rather than immediately jump in and try to solve their problems.

Pick up a copy of “I Just Want My Kids To Be Happy!” for some great advice on how to teach your children to navigate their way through life rather than having you do it for them.

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My 28 month old daughter soaks up information like the proverbial sponge, with her vocabulary increasing every day-she speaks in sentences now and tells us JOKES!-and she LOVES to learn new things. Even after eleven years of parenting, I am always looking for creative suggestions on ways to teach concepts and have fun at the same time, so I was thrilled to find the book Gymboree Play & Learn, 1001 fun activities for your baby and child.

The book is divided into separate sections for babies ages 0+, 3+, 6+, 9+, 12+, 18+, 24+, 30+, and then years 3, 4, and 5. In the 24+ section, I found suggestions for teaching patterns using colored blocks, making a homemade sock octopus toy, tying shoe boxes together for a stuffed animal “train” (I just sent a bunch of shoe boxes to recycling, darn it!), painting sugar cookies with food coloring, teaching rhyming words, even teaching the positive side of the word “no” by asking ridiculous questions like “are we standing in the ocean right now?”. There are enough suggestions to keep us going for months!

And because she loves to “read” and be read to, I also got the Gymboree board books Shapes, and also Alphabet. All of these books use easy to recognize shapes in colors that just pop off the page.

Click any of the above links to go to the pages on Amazon where you can buy Play & Learn and the Shapes or Alphabet board books, you and your child are sure to enjoy them!

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Elisha Cooper wrote and illustrated children’s books for years before becoming a parent himself, a situation he did not expect since he really didn’t care much for children in person. And parents-parents were former married couples who used to go to movies and out to dinner at fine restaurants. Beginning with the day his wife delivered their first daughter, Cooper lays out in fine detail exactly how it felt for him to be a first-time father.

In “Crawling: A Father’s First Year“, Mr. Cooper takes us along on his journey to learn how to be a father to his baby daughter Zoe. Beginning with bundling her up for walks down the hills of Berkley to his favorite coffee shop, navigating the tricky business of eating in restaurants with a child who goes from basically being a “handbag” (I know exactly what he means) to being a ticking time bomb, and ending with learning to speak the language of the Moms at the playground, Cooper uses humor and a true way with words to give the reader a unique perspective on parenting. The fact is, fathers parent differently from mothers, and we don’t often get such a candid look at how they really feel about it.

One way that Cooper learned to cope with the unpredictability of a baby was to take to the outdoors whenever possible. With Zoe secured in a Baby Bjorn, he would take her for long walks and as they went, he would point out to her what they were seeing and hearing. There was always a walk in the morning, and quite often, another walk in the evening as well. I have It was from those evening walks that Cooper was inspired to write “A Good Night Walk“.

The story begins at the front door of the Cooper home, walking past the neighbors’ houses, with descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells they encounter. When they reach the bay, “with long boats on top, and the round moon rising above”, they turn around and head back. This time, the sights, sounds, and smells are reversing themselves, as everything and everyone prepares for the coming of the night, and the story ends back at the Cooper’s front door.

The single sentence on each page gives the reader ample time to enjoy Cooper’s charming pencil-and-watercolor illustrations-follow his example, and point out everything you see on each page. “A Good Night Walk” is the perfect bedtime story.

Both books are perfect gifts for first-time parents, especially fathers. A copy of each would be an excellent baby shower gift! You can pick up both books on Amazon or at local bookstores. I know you will enjoy either book as much as I did.

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If you are looking for the perfect gift for your daughter, niece, cousin, friend, or any special young lady you know, The Daring Book for Girls needs to be at the top of your list. I received the book from the authors and founders of MotherTalk, Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, and I haven’t stopped reading it since. I read it quickly, then I went back and read it slowly, and then I started telling everyone around me about it.

It’s 279 pages of everything from how to build a scooter to the history of Queens and Princesses around the world. The introduction to the book reminds us that “Girls today are girls of the twenty-first century, with email accounts, digital cable, iPods, and complex video games”. They seem to be abandoning childhood sooner and sooner every year, and what this book does is remind us of all the possibilities that girls have.

Would you like to hear what Andi and Miriam have to say about the book? Watch their interview on The Today Show. Or, read the reviews posted on the book’s Amazon page.

I was amazed by the vastness of the knowledge contained in this book. I had forgotten all about Handclap Games, which took up most of recess when I was in elementary school. Same with Cootie Catchers-remember making those? My daughter is still too young for most of the games and crafts in this book, but you can bet that The Daring Book for Girls is going to occupy a prime spot on our living room bookshelf, and in five years when she’s having her first sleepover, I’ll know exactly how to teach a room full of seven year olds how to make God’s Eyes and how to do a cartwheel.

I also enjoyed the detailed information on basketball (I had no idea that there was more than one type of Forward), the 14 different ways to play Tag, and the history of women Explorers and Inventors. Women in history have done some amazing and, well, daring things, and that’s something that every female should know about, regardless of age.

Go, buy this book. Let’s help teach girls that there are a lot of things they can do besides text their friends and listen to their iPods. Let’s show them how empowering it is to know how to change a tire, paddle a canoe, and negotiate a salary (well, that one might be more for you than for a seven year old!). Let’s bring back jumping rope, how to tie a bandanna, and how to write an actual letter (on paper you make yourself, even, written in secret spy language!)

This book makes me want to be a kid again. Thank you so much Andi and Miriam, for writing this book and keeping the traditions of childhood alive. For reminding us of how important women have been in history up until now, and how important they will be in times to come. For making me excited about having a daughter to whom I can teach all the things in The Daring Book for Girls. I just wish I could get the words to “Miss Merry Mack” out of my head now

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One of my biggest fears as a parent is that my kids will hide things from me. As a teenager, I felt like my parents were so wrapped up in their own lives that they just didn’t have time to learn anything about mine. I lied to my parents all the time, about where I was, who I was with, and what we were doing. And it terrifies me beyond belief that my kids will lie to me too. All I can hope is that with the right communication, my kids will know how important they are to me and their Dad, that they will understand why it’s important for them to make safe choices, that they won’t ever feel like we don’t care about them.

Parent Bloggers Network sent me “The Teen Whisperer”, by cattle rancher and counselor Mike Linderman. That’s right, he’s a real-life cowboy who raises cattle on a working ranch, and then goes to a job at the Spring Creek Lodge in Montana. Spring Creek is a place where teens whose parents have tried everything to keep their kids away from drugs, alcohol, and other unsafe behaviors can go to learn the reasons behind their behavior, and how to live different lives. Mike Linderman has a no-nonsense approach to counseling these kids that works. What does he do? He treats them with respect, he is honest with them, he challenges them. And it works.

In “The Teen Whisperer“, not only will you learn how to talk to your teens, but you will also get a unique inside look at what teens are really thinking and feeling. By using examples from his counseling sessions, Linderman gives us a glimpse inside the minds of some really troubled kids. It turns out that the corpus callosum, the set of nerves that connect all the parts of the brain, is not yet fully developed in teens. Which means that teens can’t make the connections that adults can make-cause and effect, actions and consequences, etc.

I can hear myself, saying to my 11 year old, “didn’t you understand that if you did THIS, THAT could happen?” The answer is, no, he probably couldn’t. Not that it lets me off the hook, but it shows me that I need to ease up on the expectations.

The book is broken down into four separate sections-Part One is an introduction to Linderman, his philosophy, his method of counseling which is called “reality therapy”, and his experiences working with kids.

Part Two is a discussion of our five primary needs, which shape all of the choices we make. Those needs are Survival, Love and Belonging, Power, Freedom, and Fun.

Part Three gets into specific acting-out behaviors that teens use when one of those needs isn’t being met.

Part Four combines all of that knowledge with an understanding of how teens communicate so that you can develop your own approach to communicating with your teen.

Even if your children are not yet teens, I recommend reading this book. By incorporating some of these methods into how we communicate with our kids now, maybe we can avoid problems in the future. If our kids know that we understand that they are different than us, but that we are here to help guide the choices they are going to make, we can hopefully prevent breakdowns in communication at a later date. I am so grateful to Parent Bloggers Network for sending me this book, it might make the difference between having troubled teens and having, well, less troubled teens.

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