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Your Child's Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them | 
 enlarge | Author: Jenifer Fox M.ed.
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $4.80
You Save: $20.15 (81%)
New (36) Used (19) from $3.57
Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 9919
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0670018767
Dewey Decimal Number: 372.21
EAN: 9780670018765
ASIN: 0670018767
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
An essential book for parents and teachers that explores how childrens individual strengths create success
With this groundbreaking work, educator Jenifer Fox is poised to change the conversation about education in this country. For too long, parents and teachers have focused on identifying and fixing kids weaknesses to improve academic performance. Passionately written and informed by Foxs twenty-five years of experience, Your Childs Strengths turns that flawed paradigm on its head. Foxs strengths-based philosophy provides the tools to prepare kids for the future in a world that demands greater adaptability and creative thinking than ever before.
Your Childs Strengths will give parents and teachers the tools to discover strengths in three main areas: Activity Strengths, the tasks that make you feel engaged and energized; Relationship Strengths, the things you do for and with others that make you feel valued and competent; and Learning Strengths, the unique ways we approachand understand new information. All three strengths work in tandem.
Pairing inspiring firsthand accounts of success with practical workbook tools and an outline of the award- winning Affinities Program Fox has implemented at her own school, this much- needed book is a user- friendly guide for parents, teachers, and administrators that will improve individual performance and an indispensable road map for young people and society to a future that plays to strengths.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 The Best Parenting Book I've Ever Read!! September 2, 2008
This is by far the best parenting book I have ever read, and I thank Jennifer Fox over and over for writing it! I am not often moved by an author, and I have never been inspired by a parenting book like I have been with this one. This book speaks directly to my heart and every story brings tears to my eyes and gives me hope for being a better mom. I'm glad I bought the hardcover because I will read this book again and again as my children grow.
 Dig deeper August 25, 2008
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
This book by Jenifer Fox offers a unique view on the development and education of your children. Rather than depending on a rigid school curriculum and then using test results to pinpoint weaknesses, she advocates finding the child's strengths and interests and building upon these to improve their overall academic performance.
The book provides a guide to finding a child's main strengths - Activity Strengths (tasks that a child is good at, and enjoys doing); Relationship Strengths (things a child does for or with others that strengthens a relationship) and Learning Strengths (the way a child approaches and assimilates information)
The first part of the book provides a background to the strengths-based curriculum developed by the author, with real life examples, suggestions, and advice on how a parent can help a child to identify individual strengths through a series of simple non-invasive questions.
The second part is a comprehensive workbook for educators and parents, with a series of exercises to be completed with children and young adults of ages from four to eighteen. Though time consuming, a little daunting, and requiring a lot of input, there are some exercises that can be easily adopted to fit your personal family schedule. It is recommended that the exercises be done in the order laid out in the book, but you don't have to complete every single one before moving on to the next.
If used properly, this book could be the key to improving your child's all around performance, but be warned that it will take a lot of time and commitment on both sides.
Amanda Richards, August 24, 2008
Starting them on a Me Inc. journey August 23, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The older we get, the more we realize that life is a journey of discover into who we are; and those who help guide us along that path are called our most honored teachers. In this easy to read tutorial, educator Jenifer Fox relies on stories from her life and her life's work with children to demonstrate the importance of integrating that process into your child's education and then provides the how-to-do manual.
Arguing persuasively against systems that place all comers into a common box and then looks to identify failure (weakness) as the path to growth, Fox reminds us that we are all unique, individual beings with both weaknesses and strengths. Recognizing that our weaknesses are most often the underside of a powerful strength, educator Fox shows us how to use this strength base as a foundation for growth and learning - starting not when we are adults, but starting from an early age by incorporating this concept into our educational institutions. Recognizing that this strength positioning applies not just to students, but also to the teachers, Fox created an Affinities Program as an alternative to standardized teaching and testing methodologies.
Applying the well accepted "Head, Heart, & Hands" framework to strength understanding, Fox categorizes children's (adults too, for that matter) strengths as Learning, Relational, or Activity based, and provides examples and discovery techniques for each. If you have done any introspective analysis yourself, you will appreciate that a book cannot give the answers to your child's strengths, but this one will surely help you start them on that journey and integrate it into their educational development.
Do not be off-put by the nearly 350 pages. The book takes only 160 pages to present the usual problem/solution argument - an easy two sitting read. The next 75 pages are the how-to-do application piece for working with the child - a worthwhile book in its own right. By including the Affinities curriculum as an appendix to the book, Fox expanded the book beyond the usual < 250 page limit for the easy read designation - consider this your free gift when you buy the book.
This book is highly recommended for anyone who loves a child.
Dennis DeWilde, Author of "The Performance Connection"
Your Child's Strengths by Jenifer Fox July 15, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
What an excellent book for parents, educators, and just about everyone else too. "Your Child's Strengths" by Jenifer Fox is a well-structured, logical, and methodical plan for bringing out the best in children, while inculcating resiliance and responsibility to help them face the ups and downs ahead of them.
Fox uses well thought-out plans, exercises, and examples to help her target audience learn how to re-focus their senses to work WITH children rather than trying to work ON children. Her approach is designed to assist the parent or educator in acting as a guide to the child who discovers their own strengths. I'm sure anyone who has ever had or worked with a child can verify that truths which come from within are much more powerful and have much more staying power than those others 'teach' TO us. Learning to recognize your own strengths vice talents can be compared to recognizing small epiphanies that occur in your life when you are happy, pleased, and self-confident. In this respect, the book is a manual for recognizing personal strengths in ourselves as well as enabling our children to learn to recognize and work with their strengths.
Fox is careful to explain the both the concepts behind this strategy and the actions needed to carry it out. The first part of the book explains the reasoning and successes of this method. The second portion provides descriptions and examples for recognizing strengths and how to delve deeper than mere words by utilizing all our senses to pick up what children can't or won't say. The final chapters are literally a textbook with exercises, suggestions, and charts each reader can use.
Even the appendices have structure and use as they detail lists and writings to implement this process individually, in the family, in groups, and grade-by-grade in schools. There are also success stories and contacts available for readers.
As both a mother and an educator, I'm very encouraged after reading "Your Child's Strengths". Both parents looking for guidance and educators screaming for help (although maybe I should phrase that the other way around!) can use the truths laid out so diligently in Jenifer Fox's book to combat the negativity so prevalent around us and infecting our children. I'll certainly be recommending it to my fellow educators and close friends. After all, with so much to learn the target audience need not be restricted to parents and educators. Personal growth is not, and should not be, only a childhood experience.
One Way to Overcome No Child Left Behind June 18, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
Education isn't getting much play in the 2008 presidential election coverage. I suspect that with all the hoopla around the politics of politics, as well as the state of the economy, the Iraq war and Eliot Spitzer's future career plans, there won't be a lot of campaign coverage about how to create better schools that meet the needs of our kids.
So, as with many things, looking out for the best interests of our kids' education is up to us parents.
One author is trying to lend us a hand on that front with her new book, Your Child's Strengths.
Author Jenifer Fox has presented a theme I really agree with -- old ways aren't always the best. Old ways in teaching our children, old ways in preparing curricula, old ways in not worrying whether we inspire our children or focus on what they're best at when they're at school because teachers are too focused "the test."
For the most part, we, as parents, don't really have a role in choosing things that impact our children's formal learning. And with outdated ways of assessing children's strengths at school (if they are assessed at all), how are parents supposed to help?
Your Child's Strengths confirms what I suspected -- that the atmosphere in schoolrooms, with standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind mandates -- are doing a lot to kill our kids' natural love of learning and sense of curiosity. And isn't that precisely the information anyone needs to figure out where our individual strengths lie?
If we want to give our kids a shot are being something more than learning automatons, parents need to play a more active role in figuring out what our kids are good at and what makes them excited and inspired. I n her book, Fox gives us a new arsenal of tools to do that.
Some of her advice is common sense -- spend time with your children, focus on what they love, then nurture and encourage those strengths. If your child is a bit more inscrutable about revealing their passions, she's got a series of questions, tasks and activities that can help discover the things that energize and engage our children.
Initially some of the advice may seem overwhelming, but on second glance, much of it is based on parental assessment that comes from everyday life. For example, what household tasks do your kids do and not complain about or really like? I'm not sure what this says about her, but PunditGirl LOVES to mop the kitchen floor (am I a lucky mom, or what?!)
While some of the self-reflection required to do the suggested activities and assessments may be harder for some children than others, we as parents can use this advice to become more tuned in to the clues and signals our kids send us that we can then use to steer them toward things that will make them excited about learning.
As for eight-year-old PunditGirl, we're having a hard time narrowing things down at the moment -- but I think she's leaning toward being a poet, an Olympic ice skater, a babysitter or a pirate.
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