Book Review: How to get the Children You Want with the Kids You Have by Marie Ricks

This is an ambitious book that would have benefited from narrowing its focus and using more specifics.  The author wrote this book to help all the parents out there who are having trouble figuring out how to help their children learn to work and become the responsible and competent adults they need to become.  Certainly that is one of my main goals in life and I'm sure most parents share that goal.

She has some good ideas such as training children in specific jobs before encouraging them to become independent.  I am sure I'm not the only parent guilty of expecting my children to figure out what they're supposed to do without adequate training.  The challenge is taking the time to do the training.  Obviously it has to be a priority.  I also liked her ideas on teaching children to be obedient.  She talks about making it a game and rewarding children when they come quickly when they are called.  This is definitely an area our family could some work. 

Another idea I plan to implement is using a "to-do" list for each family member at family council, keeping that list in a visible location like the kitchen, and then asking for an accounting the following week.  We have tried to use planners for that purpose but I think the main failing with that is that the kids don't pull them out and look at them like they need to.  I really want the children to put the goals they make on that list and then put them on the refrigerator where they see them frequently.  We'll see how that works out...

One area that could have used more details was on motivating children.  Candy only gets you so far.  She also had a few good ideas on creative compliments but what about those of us seriously lacking in imagination?  A special section on motivating teenagers would have been great.  One big focus in the book was teaching your child to clean their room and get ready for the day.  She says something about having different expectations for older children in cleaning their room but she doesn't really address this topic beyond that.  What is reasonable to expect for teenagers' rooms?  I personally think once a week is not frequent enough but I'm not really sure what would be reasonable.  Also, if your children are older, how do you implement these ideas?

One good line in the book is about how children don't do what is expected; they do what is inspected.  That's for sure.  But how to make those inspections happen?  This is another area I feel is lacking in the book:  logisitics.  How do you make all these things happen with all the other responsibilities you have, especially with a lot of small children?  More ideas and examples of how other people have done it would have been helpful. I sometimes felt the author was afraid of being too specific in coming up with job charts.  I felt that shuffling the index cards around to decide on which jobs to give which children was one idea but more ideas could have been used.  Certainly rearranging the jobs every month or two is pretty time-consuming and not really doable for a lot of moms.

I liked the brief chapter on helping your children have a more simple life but this is another chapter that could have used a lot more ideas.  She suggested that a child needs only about one outfit per year of life.  I don't find that a particularly helpful rule of thumb.  If your three-year-old only has three outfits to wear, you're going to run out of clean clothes pretty quickly, especially when they're potty-training!

As always, like other books about parenting, this is not a life-changing book. It had a few good ideas that I may be able to use.  Perhaps that alone makes it a book worth reading.