Books Read #21-23 ⎮ June 2017

Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

Since I have two boys of my own, Boys Adrift by by Dr. Leonard Sax looked like a worthy read. It was. If you are raising boys, I would high recommend reading this book. As my boys are still small, I am determined to help them stay motivated in whatever way I can.

The book addresses five factors affecting boys today including: changes in schools, video games (issues with virtual vs. real), ADHD diagnoses/medications, endocrine disruptors (found in our modern environments), and the loss of male role models. 

Dr. Sax offers some good suggestions on how to combat these factors to help your son reach his full potential and not fail to launch (he acknowledges that girls have their own set of factors, but his book speaks specifically to boys).

I thought this was a good read – while there are plenty of notes at the end of the book with more information, the book itself didn't feel bogged down by research. It also offered good tips that wouldn't be too hard to implement. I hope we are mindful of these factors as we raise our boys.

A few highlights from this book:
The explicit motivation behind the founding of the Boy Scouts was to "make men of little boys and to foster independent manhood." There was no assumption that an independent manhood would just happen naturally.

"What does it mean to be a man?" The answer is: being a man means using your strength in service to others.

Boys who prefer the video game version over the real thing are making a choice very similar to boys who prefer online pornography to interacting with real girls.

To become a man, a boy must see a man. But that man doesn't have to be a father. In fact, ideally it shouldn't be only his father. Even if your son has a strong father or father figure in his life, he also needs a community of men who together can provide him with varied models of what productive adult men do.

Ambition. Drive. Determination. Call it what you will, it is this characteristic more than any other that now distinguishes the emerging nations from the United States. 
 

I gave this book 5/5 stars on Goodreads.

  

Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path

The other adult book I read this month was Chasing Slow by Erin Loechner (creator of the Design for Mankind blog). Erin is one of my favorite bloggers and I had heard a lot of great things about her debut book. The book encompasses Erin's personal story and is full of great tidbits about slowing life down intentionally... I am planning to write a separate blog post about intentional slowness with more thoughts about her book, but I wanted to include a blurb in my monthly book wrap-up as well. I think that in order to get the most out of this book you have to read it like a series of blog posts. It felt a bit choppy for me as an actual book, but the content is good (Erin is a great writer, so I'm going to blame the editing).

I gave this book 4/5 stars on Goodreads.

 

The Sandman and the War of Dreams 

 

I made a deal with Jack that we would watch The Guardians movie after we completed the fourth book in The Guardians series, The Sandman and the War of Dreams, by William Joyce. It turns out that I was wrong on two counts. I thought Jack Frost was going to be introduced in this book (he's not) AND I thought book four was the end (it's not). It turns out the 5th book in the series will be released a year from now, and that one will be about Jack Frost.

 

Anyways, I continue to love this series. I'm not always sure that Jack is actually paying attention to the read alouds, but I recently quizzed him on all of the characters we have met along the way, and he knew all of them and the basic story line. So that's good. We will go ahead and watch the movie since I told Jack we would, but I am looking forward to reading the 5th book next year.

I gave this book 5/5 stars on Goodreads.

Honorable Mention:
We make it to the library at least once a month and both boys choose books to read. This month Jack chose: Curious George, Oh, the places you'll go!, Good King Wenceslas, Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures: The Intrepid Canadian Expedition (see below), Max's Dragon Shirt, and Dragons Love Tacos (his favorite from this selection of picture books).

We are continuing to make our way through the Flat Stanley series by creator Jeff Brown with Jack. This month he chose Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures: The Intrepid Canadian Expedition (Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures #4). Unfortunately our local library doesn't have every book in the series and Jack is a bit bummed that we can't read them in the EXACT order.

Isaac's Library picks this month were truck song and Fire Engine No. 9. We read these books over and over to him, and then we read them some more!

Books Read #1-5 ⎮ January 2017

January is coming to a close and my reading is off to a good start with five books finished. I started the month with an introduction to a young author who writes fiction in the fantasy-Christian genre, if there is such a thing. Her writing is stylistically similar to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and she has also been likened to George Macdonald (who happens to be one of my parents favorite authors, but I have never read his books). 

Rachel Starr Thomson writes in a captivating way that really held my attention and sparked my imagination, which I appreciate, and she's Canadian! I don't read a lot of fiction, so I think her books are worth reading because I kept wanting to read more. 

This month I read Exile and Hive from The Oneness Cycle series (there are 5 books in the series), an allegory titled Journey, and finally the first book in The Seventh World trilogy, Worlds Unseen.

I enjoyed The Oneness Cycle books, but there were a few times I got a little lost in the story. I do hope to complete the whole series as I have time. My favorite book so far was Worlds Unseen. The writing is beautiful and I spent an entire Saturday shirking my mom duties to finish. Journey was written in a similar style to Pilgrim's Progress. It was a quick read, really more of a short story than a novel, that uses prose to describe the christian walk.

After I exhausted my free downloads from Rachel Starr Thomson, I headed to my local library and picked up a book that has been on my to read list for a while: The Collapse of Parenting by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D.

On occasion Daniel and I will discuss our parenting, and we wonder if we are doing it right. Are we teaching our kids the right things? We don't want them to grow up to feel entitled to anything. We want them to be respectful and kind to everyone. We want them to work hard and earn their own successes. Obviously there is more than that, but these are a few of the things that we discuss.

The Collapse of Parenting makes me think we are doing fine in our parenting efforts. Dr. Sax puts an emphasis on teaching children respect by being an authority in their lives, he stresses the importance of family meals as often as possible together, and reminds parents to limit technology and put down the phones. He also discusses the propensity of American parents to defer to teachers and doctors who tend to over-medicate children in an attempt to get the kids to behave. He says Americans, in particular, have adopted a pass the buck mentality – parents aren't willing to discipline, teachers are limited on how much they can discipline, and doctors are willingly prescribing strong drugs to keep the kids in line.

I thought the book was a good read, and definitely had excellent points throughout. As for our parenting, I think a lot of what we do as parents is in line with the suggestions that Dr. Sax makes in his book.

A few passages that stuck out to me:

The right kind of humility helps you to recognize your own shortcomings. To be better prepared. To understand the risks. And to take those risk courageously, when necessary.

The antidote to the culture of bloated self-esteem is the culture of humility... The culture of humility leads to gratitude, appreciation, and contentment. The key to lasting happiness is contentment.

Train up your child in the way they should go, and when they grow up and move away from home, you will have improved the odds (paraphrase of one of the Proverbs)... There are no guarantees. But the research strongly suggests that if you instill habits of good behavior and self-control in your son or daughter throughout childhood and adolescence, then you have improved the odds that your child will continue to do the right thing after leaving home.
 
At some level... many Americans... have accepted the idea that the primary purpose of K-12 schooling... is to get accepted into a selective college... That's a mistake. The primary purpose of education should be to prepare for life, not for more school... The skills needed to get into a top university are not the same as those needed for a successful life...