Discover them, develop the, use them. A guide for parents and teachers

Jenifer Fox is on a mission: to radically transform how we as parents, teachers, & a society view our children & their education.

She is on the cutting edge of applying a new philosophy called "the strengths movement" to children. Basically, the strengths paradigm recognizes that real personal success in life hinges on discovering, developing, & using the unique combination of strengths in every individual. Understand, develop, & use your strengths, & you will have the maximum impact in your work & relationships while growing to your fullest & enjoying life. Putting it another way, one size doesn't fit all in education or life, and if you try to fit square pegs into round holes you are guaranteed a life of frustration.

Jenifer's mission is a very personal one: she relates how she was very much one of those square pegs in a traditional classroom setting, and barely graduated from high school. But she was fortunate to find a mentor in college who saw her strengths, encouraged her to develop them, & now she is the headmaster of a private school dedicated to helping children grow & flourish.

Your Child's Strengths is divided into three parts: part one describes the problems associated with conventional education and how it is increasingly failing the needs of our children in this rapidly changing world. Part two discusses the nature of strengths & how & why to discover & develop them. Part three is a book within a book: a workbook detailing an entire multi-year curriculum that can be used by parents and teachers to help teens discover their strengths.

This 300+ page book is ambitious in all it tries to cover. If you're a parent of a teen in a conventional education setting like I am, you can be easily overwhelmed at trying to integrate everything in this book into your parenting. But as the old saying goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and this book will set you one of the most important journeys a parent or teacher can ever take: the journey of helping your child discover, develop, & use their strengths. ( )

What an excellent book for parents, educators, and just about everyone else too. "Your Child's Strengths" by Jenifer Fox is a well-structured, logical, and methodical plan for bringing out the best in children, while inculcating resiliance and responsibility to help them face the ups and downs ahead of them.

Fox uses well thought-out plans, exercises, and examples to help her target audience learn how to re-focus their senses to work WITH children rather than trying to work ON children. Her approach is designed to assist the parent or educator in acting as a guide to the child who discovers their own strengths. I'm sure anyone who has ever had or worked with a child can verify that truths which come from within are much more powerful and have much more staying power than those others 'teach' TO us. Learning to recognize your own strengths vice talents can be compared to recognizing small epiphanies that occur in your life when you are happy, pleased, and self-confident. In this respect, the book is a manual for recognizing personal strengths in ourselves as well as enabling our children to learn to recognize and work with their strengths.
Fox is careful to explain the both the concepts behind this strategy and the actions needed to carry it out. The first part of the book explains the reasoning and successes of this method. The second portion provides descriptions and examples for recognizing strengths and how to delve deeper than mere words by utilizing all our senses to pick up what children can't or won't say. The final chapters are literally a textbook with exercises, suggestions, and charts each reader can use.

Even the appendices have structure and use as they detail lists and writings to implement this process individually, in the family, in groups, and grade-by-grade in schools. There are also success stories and contacts available for readers.

As both a mother and an educator, I'm very encouraged after reading "Your Child's Strengths". Both parents looking for guidance and educators screaming for help (although maybe I should phrase that the other way around!) can use the truths laid out so diligently in Jenifer Fox's book to combat the negativity so prevalent around us and infecting our children. I'll certainly be recommending it to my fellow educators and close friends. After all, with so much to learn the target audience need not be restricted to parents and educators. Personal growth is not, and should not be, only a childhood experience. ( )

Fox is an experienced teacher who effectively makes the case that we should be educating children according to their natural strengths, for their benefit and ours. She describes the three types of strengths: Activity, Learning, and Relationship. Along the way, she also provides a summary of the evolution of theories in education. The book includes a series of activities parents can do with their children to reveal their strengths. ( )