Winning the Heart of Your Child by Mike Berry

9 Keys to Building a Positive Lifelong Relationship with Your Kids

What is my why in parenting? This is the question I take away from the book, the one I want to think about occasionally. Michael Hyatt said, "People lose their way when they lose their why." And to quote Mike Berry, the author, "When we don't know why we are doing something, when we've forgotten our purpose, we get lost." "Remember that you are in this because you love your child, and ultimately you want to raise a human being who lives with character and integrity and who leaves a lasting impression on the world."  That sums it up well, that is why I try to be consistent, that is why I listen and try to answer 10,000 questions a day, that is why I am trying to teach obedience and respect and responsibility.  But it is easy to lose the long-term focus and just see the day and all its pressures and frustrations and lose heart and patience.

Mike offers some good practical solutions and tips for help on this parenting journey. I think one of them that sticks out to me is to endure the shift, that time when your child no longer looks to you for their number one person, but instead moves you down to number four and looks to friends, culture and other adults first. You are still on the list and your child is still hearing you even though they might not act like it. Along with that point, his next one was to widen your child's circle of influence and bring in other adults who share your values. A child is more likely to listen to them in five minutes of conversation than they are to you after three weeks of the same conversation. And I am not too old to remember that myself, other people just made more sense than my own parents, even if they were saying the same thing. I still have years until I reach the teenage years, but I know they will creep by swiftly.

I will say that the one thing I struggled with in this book was trusting the author. He doesn't have enough years of parenting under his belt to make me fully trust him. He's only been a parent for 16 years and yes, he spent 17 years in family/life ministry, but I guess for me parenting books should be written by someone who's made it through the trenches and so I struggled to take him seriously. I will say though that he made some excellent points and I think there's much truth behind what he says. He is also the dad to eight children, all of them adopted. And while I don't like making the distinction between adopted and biological children, some of their children are dealing with trauma that happened before they were adopted which has led to much more intense parenting. They also adopted a child at age 24 as well. So all that to say, I don't want to discredit the book at all, I'm just saying what gave me a bit of pause with it.

I received this book from Baker Books and was not required to write a positive review.