ABOUT THE BOOK
Title: Let Them Be KidsAuthor: Jessica Smartt
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Release Date: June 9, 2020
Genre: Christian Living/Parenting
As every parent hopes to raise kids with good manners and values, Jessica Smartt’s practical guide fills the gaps of uncertainty and provides tips on how parents can equip their children in purity, faith, and creativity.
Former English teacher and homeschooling mother of three, Jessica Smartt felt the weight of helping prepare her kids for life, especially with all the outside pressures and influence of the world. She struggled with how she could raise her children with a sense of adventure, self-confidence, manners, faith, and the ability to utilize technology wisely.
Let Them Be Kids is Jessica’s offering of grace and confidence to moms, giving them practical ideas to meet these challenges. Her well-researched, tested methods, woven together with her personal stories and witty humor, deliver wisdom on the tough topics of life, such as
- family time vs. outside activities,
- being “cool” or not,
- boredom,
- technology usage
- sexual purity, and
- showing grace when kids disobey.
Let Them Be Kids helps moms feel confident and equipped with ways to provide a safe, healthy, Christ-centered childhood for their children. It leads them to conquer fear and find truth that transforms them and their families as it reminds them how to enjoy and cherish the special memory-making moments of building family values together.
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Most of us are not raising children who carry a past with profound levels of trauma. (Although some of us are, and to those of you, I say a prayer that you feel the strength for this incredible job. You have my deep respect.) But while many of us are not raising children who experienced complex trauma, none of us have unvarnished children with perfect habits.
We have children for whom we wish we could do this differently or that differently. We have kids who have seen things we wish they hadn’t seen or know things we wish they didn’t know. We have kids who have developed habits we wish they hadn’t developed. We may be tempted to feel we are reading some of this too late to help.
Thankfully, this is not true.
Even if you are reading this as a thirtysomething grown-up, it is not too late for you to change. It is not too late for you to have adventures, to break unhealthy technology habits, to resurrect play and imagination, to return balance and manners and faith to your life. And if it is not too late for you, it is certainly not too late for them.
This is because three things are true.
1. We can learn, or relearn, how to enjoy simple pleasures.
2. We can build new habits.
3. Innocence can be restored.
For instance, kids who have been addicted to video games can become unaddicted and instead learn to love being outside. Kids who never enjoyed children’s classics such as Little House on the Prairie or The Boxcar Children can learn to read them and enjoy them. Even kids who don’t have grit or manners can learn
either—or both.
There is hope for childhood. Not in the abstract, blank slate of future children but in your children, the ones in your home.
As you read, promise me that you will not lose hope. The virtues you read about here are powerful and real and worth fighting to regain. Do not despair. Change is possible.
Taken from “Let Them Be Kids” by Jessica Smartt. Copyright 2020 by Jessica Smartt. Used with permission from www.thomasnelson.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
