Book Review: Motivate Your Child by Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller

Today, Motivate Your Child by Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller is finally AVAILABLE!

I've been a huge fan of Dr. Turansky and Mrs. Miller's parenting books for several years now. When I was given the opportunity to participate on their launch team for Motivate Your Child, I was over-the-moon! I have been struggling these last few months with figuring out how to motivate my children. When Lexie and Ashlyn were younger, they both had a strong drive to "do it myself" that kept them self-motivated. But as they've gotten older, that hasn't seemed to work as well. They still enjoy learning new things, but I've noticed a couple challenges. One is a lack of motivation once they have mastered a skill. The other, that I've seen in their schoolwork, is giving up easily when something is hard.

Meanwhile, as Little Bit (5) gets older, I'm realizing that she doesn't have that same "do it myself" attitude that her older sisters had, and that, combined with hearing her sisters complain about chores, has led to a lack of motivation on her part as well.

So, this book came to me at the PERFECT TIME (God is soo cool!)! Normally I love ebooks, but I have to admit, as I started reading my (advance) .pdf copy of this book, I found myself anxiously looking forward to the print copy so I could make notes and underline as I went. So I was especially excited when my copy of the book came!

And yes, I've been scribbling all over it, and loving every minute. As happens so often, when I review a "how to" type book, I found that I wanted to take it slow with actually implementing, and I needed to read it in a certain time frame. So I chose to read it, and mark it up, during the review period. I've been praying and mulling over the ideas and keeping them in mind, but now I want to go back through and read this book one chapter at a time and really pray about, and discuss with my children, and focus on the ideas in that chapter, and then move forward.

As you can tell from the title, Motivate Your Child explains how to build internal motivation in your child(ren) so that they choose to do what's right for the right reasons! This book gives practical ideas and real-life examples from the authors' counseling experience. The first part of the book focuses on moral development and the second part focuses on spiritual development. Both are sooooo important to raising our children!

This isn't a "quick fix" kind of thing. It's about building relationships and changing ourselves and our children's hearts. I can't tell you that, after reading this book, my children are perfectly motivated to do what's right in every situation, but I CAN tell you that reading this book has given me so much HOPE for something that I have felt very discouraged about! I feel like now I at least know a direction to go, and how to move forward in helping my children, both the tweens and the 5 year old, want to do what's right, and even more importantly, to lead them in their spiritual development.

This is a book that I recommend to parents of children of all ages!

Other products that I have reviewed for the National Center for Biblical Parenting:

   Christian Parenting Handbook
   A Family Toolbox

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