You can raise good kids!

(Book review – Loving our kids on purpose by Danny Silk)

I wish I could have read this book when my daughter was younger.  It’s apparently revolutionizing the way some parents love, protect, and teach their children.

Fundamentally, the book isn't about training your kids. It’s about training you, the parent, to act in ways that are beneficial to your children in the long term, instead of reacting to their behaviour automatically and in the moment.

Silk goes by the premise that a parent's job is to thoroughly equip a child to be free and independent through full awareness and acceptance of responsibilities and their consequences. No matter how helpful we as parents want to be in the moment, unless we want to create yet another juvenile delinquent, we have to allow our children to face the consequences of their actions.

For parents used to the control and domination style of parenting this book will definitely shift some paradigms. However If what you want for your child is ‘freedom’ (to become a person who fully owns and accepts responsibility for every one of his or her actions and doesn't expect anyone else to come to the rescue to fix their foul-ups) then this won’t necessarily be a bad thing. After all, none of us wants a child who is a compliant little yes sir type at home, who runs wild behind our backs. We’d all much rather have kids who also do the right thing when we’re not around.

Although this is a Christian parenting book, it is quite revolutionary because unlike most others from the same genre it does not promote blind obedience to parents and other authority figures. Silk’s approach does not rely on children learning to accept being controlled by well meaning parents and adults because, in his view, we discover as we gain independence, that no one controls us. So sooner or later we realise that actually, we must learn to control ourselves.

Although the premise behind the book may seem a little way out, it isn't. The concept is practical. But instead of managing children through threatening, hidings and other punishments, Silk advocates a fresh approach – offering freedom; but freedom within limits because obviously, for a child, freedom cannot be absolute. It is 'freedom within their ability to manage it.'

Silk’s idea is to sometimes allow 'Rational Anarchy.' That is, the individual is free to make their choices. The choice is theirs and no one else’s, and the consequences (all of them) are theirs, too. His assertion is that the human mind, even in immature form, is essentially an engine for computing consequences; learning from processes like ‘trial and error’, and ‘action and reaction’.

In the book, the author gives some priceless examples of not giving into emotional manipulation, offering constant, constant, constant choices and allowing consequences to be either a reward (for good choices) or the harsh taskmaster (for poor choices.)

You, the parent, may be the engine of the consequences ("You may stop making that noise, or you may go sit in time out. It’s your choice.") Ideally you should always be ready to help, but not to step in to solve a problem FOR your child.

Silk's best illustration of offering choices involves an anecdote where his son has unwisely (and without his mom or dad’s permission) taken his hamster to school in his back pack. Sadly, he then left the backpack on the bus on the way home. (I say sadly because it’s Friday evening.) It makes for laugh out loud reading. At the end of it, the hamster is recovered. But every decision about how to solve the problem between informing his father and the recovery of his pet is forced on the boy by his father, who is content to be used as a sounding board for any ideas the child has about how to recover his pet, but isn't riding in to fix the challenge FOR his son. It is both sobering reading, and a brilliant example of smart parenting.

Silk's advice to parents is to stop out of control behaviour first, and then to offer choices. Here’s an example of his Rational Anarchy concept:

"Boys! If you want to fight where you are going to draw blood, you'd better do it away from Mom's new couch. And to make sure no bones are broken, you have to have a referee. It so happens that I'm available. I charge $10 a-piece. DING! Go to it." (The boys ended up looking at him like he was crazy and just walked away from each other, and Dad. Priceless!)

Fortunately, the methods described in the book can also be applied to raising teenagers and Silk offers an example of a mother who is not managing to ‘’manage’’ her teenage daughter who is fighting with her mom and siblings, failing at school, smoking pot and sleeping with her boyfriend. Silk offered the mother a surprising solution. It worked! A week later the mother reported to him that for the first time in ages they had peace in their home.

Published by Destiny Image, you can order the book online from Amazon. You should also be able to find it at some mainstream and in most Christian bookstores.