Secure Daughters, Confident Sons (book review)
Our society is bombarded by so many flat-out-wrong messages about boys and girls, and how to parent them. In Secure Daughters, Confident Sons, Glenn T. Stanton helps set the record straight.
Right out of the gate, Glenn makes an important statement about the need for a book such as this:
“If the rhetoric of political correctness keeps us from exploring the issue of gender differences, we lose something valuable to our humanity. Amazing scientific evidences of essential sex differences in the fields of anthropology, psychology, endocrinology, and neurology in the last few decades strongly disprove nearly all the thinking that drove the misunderstanding about gender in the first place. In fact, the more sophisticated this scientific research gets, the more it deepens our insight into the importance of male and female differences and how profoundly they exist within us.” (emphasis mine)
With a no-holds-barred approach, Glenn dismantles the politically-correct falsehoods like:
There are no real differences between boys and girls.
Kids can development just fine in a fatherless home.
Our children are just as healthy in a one-parent home as in a two-parent home.
Kids will be kids regardless of what their parents tell them.
The first few chapters alternate between information specifically for raising boys, and information specifically for raising girls. Then the later chapters zero in on the roles both Dads and Moms play in developing healthy, well-rounded, confident, secure children. Who (no surprise here) develop into healthy, well-rounded, confident, secure adults and future parents.
In one of the concluding chapters Glenn writes—
“Boys who grow up with warm and close connections with their fathers are more likely to develop a healthy masculine sense of self. …Boys who grow up with close, affectionate, and affirming relationships with their mothers have a better sensitivity to and understanding of women. …Girls who grow up close to affirming, warm, loving, and confident moms are more likely to be secure and healthy in their womanhood. Girls who grow up close to their fathers in loving and affirming relationships are more likely to be confident around boys and men as they grow.”
I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is for parents and soon-to-be parents to READ THIS BOOK! Raising children is an awesome responsibility, and we need all the help we can get!
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: book review, children, Dad, family, father, Focus On The Family, Glenn Stanton, Mom, mother, parenting. 2 Comments »
Leadership Tension
Along time ago I was studying the virtues that the Greek philosophers taught. To the Greeks, the virtue was considered the “golden mean” between two opposite extremes. It was the ability to balance the tensions that produced the virtue.
In areas where I have leadership responsibilities, I try to find the virtue of leadership as the balance between these two tensions:
Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. (1 Timothy 3:1)
Should you then seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them. (Jeremiah 45:5)
On the one side: desire leadership. On the other side: don’t desire leadership. Do your best at it, but be ready to give it up.
I love this statement on leadership from John Maxwell—
Leadership is seeing the possibilities while others are seeing the limitations.
Leadership is evoking in other the capacity to dream.
Leadership is the capacity to care, and in caring, to liberate the ideas, energy and capacity of others.
I am trying to balance the pulls of leadership, but while I do I’m loving the leadership tension!
UPDATE: This idea of leadership tension became one of the key seed thoughts for my book Shepherd Leadership: The Metrics That Really Matter.
Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: 1 Timothy, Jeremiah, John Maxwell, leadership, philosophy, quote, virtue. 1 Comment »