A True Gift of a Book!

It's no small feat when one of the thousands of parenting books available today impresses me. I'm an eclectic mama who has been studying the differences between authoritarian, attached, permissive and taking children seriously (TCS) parenting for more than 11 years now. Every book I've ever read on the subject of parenting has long been abandoned as insulting to both myself and my children, many of them because they focused on the children as the problems to be worked on. Mr. Vannoy knows exactly who needs to change their behaviors before family relations will begin to improve and it isn't the children, it's the parents.

In The 10 Gifts, Mr. Vannoy relates to us that he wasn't born a model parent. He lost his wife and children through divorce before realizing that he hadn't been a healthy role model for his daughters. The tools and gifts he developed for parents everywhere were forged in the fires of a relationship that could have easily dissolved. While much of this material in this book is simplistic in nature (i.e. merely 5 tools like "listen" and "teach"), the scope of the approach is vast. Mr. Vannoy suggests that parents focus on what values (gifts) we want to give to our children in each moment, not what behaviors we want to get out of them. It's an approach that truly earns this book the subtitle Parenting From the Heart. By outlining five simple tools anyone can use to improve their relationships and by offering examples of 10 gifts we can attempt to pass on in any situation, The 10 Gifts gives concrete suggestions for approaches that help parents to empower themselves and their children. It seems that Mr. Vannoy has ported much of this material into seminars for businesses too. This approach works so well that it seems you could improve any relationship with it, if you can only change your attitudes first.

The 272 pages of the book are padded heavily with quotes and stories. Entire pages are devoted to highlighted quotes from the text. The concentrated version of this book probably wouldn't fill 100 pages but the content is well worth the time spent digging for it. Mr. Vannoy has been giving workshops on his approach and many of the example stories in the book are feedback from parents who had applied The 10 Gifts ideas in their family lives. Seeing how other parents had chosen to use the tools was frequently very insightful and I wouldn't mind another volume of those tales alone.

In the time since I discovered this book, I've changed many of my old ideas about love, parenting, children, and how people of all ages develop into responsible adults. It's been a profound journey and I now tend to see my family's day to day issues in ways that empower everybody. Thanks, at least in part to Mr. Vannoy, I no longer feel as if I need to do battle with my children in order to raise them "right" and the whole family is grateful for the sense of peace we're now coming to know.

All in all, I don't really see how the approach, tools and gifts presented in this book could be improved upon, unless I could find a "cliff notes" version that offered me the same information without all of the fluff.