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Friday is my day off. I slept in until 6:30… no seriously, and then tackled a few good books!

The Five Love Languages of Children - Gary Chapman & Ross Campbell

• “Parents are the first and most important teachers.”

• These guys talk about kids and their capacity for learning – “Once they learn to talk, their minds are filled with questions, and three and four-year-olds can ask dozens of questions every day. When they reach the imitative stage and pretend to be adults, the seldom imitate adults at play. Rather, they imitate adults at work: washing dishes, driving a truck, being a doctor or nurse, caring for babies, cooking meals, and more. If you observe your child’s activities for just one day and ask, ‘What seems to make her the happiest? What holds her attention the longest?’ you will likely find that it is an activity in which she is learning.”

• “Both you and your child cannot take responsibility for the same thing at the same time.” The authors encourage parents to allow their children to take initiative and then responsibility. A good word to parents who take responsibility for everything in their child’s world! Let them carry some weight! Again, the authors say, “The more responsibility the parent takes… the less the child will take.”

• Chapman and Campbell get right into the whole idea of anger and the role it plays in life – “It may surprise you that the primary lifetime threat to your child is his or her own anger. If your child does not handle his own anger well, it will damage or destroy him. The mishandling of anger is related to every present and future problem your child may have – from poor grades to damaged relationships to possible suicide.”

• “Until the age of six or seven, you are working primarily to keep passive-aggressive behavior from taking root in your child. The first and most important way you do this is to keep his emotional love tank full of unconditional love. The prime cause of anger and of misbehavior is an empty love tank.” (I don’t totally agree with this last statement. I believe that sin is the primary cause of misbehavior and anger, but we can talk more about that later. Having said that, I do believe that a full love tank can certainly shape the way anger is expressed.)

• “Realize that your children have no defense against parental anger. When you dump your anger on your child, it goes right down inside the child.”

Leading at a Higher Level – Ken Blanchard, et al

• “Organizations should spend ten times more energy reinforcing the change they just made than looking for the next great change to try.”

• “Leadership has two parts: vision and implementation.”

• “Once the vision and direction are set, managers work for their people.”

• “Profit really is the applause you get from taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.”

And then of course there was the morning dose of…

… not for me of course!

Reading is a wonderful experience! What are you reading?