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Growing Up Social – Review

Growing Up Social: Raising Relational Kids in a Screen-Driven World – by Gary Chapman and Arlene Pellicane

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How has the digital age and technology affected our children? How does it affect my relationship with my children? How much technology is too much? What can I as a parent do to help my kids stay connected in real relationships?

All these questions and more are answered in this book. This is pretty standard Gary Chapman. He breaks the book down into sections like anger management (you’d be amazed at what research shows about screen time and anger) and shyness.

While there’s lots of research cited in the book about what is healthy screen time for you and your kids and how all this technology is changing our brains, Chapman also focus a lot on how to relate to your children and what skills need a little extra focus these days.

He gives great advice for setting guidelines for technology usage and what we as parents can do to set a good example for our children. Sometimes, something as simple as putting your phone away for dinner can make a big difference to your children. It’s important that my children know that they are way more important than my phone!

This book is great for if you’re just looking for some good guidelines or for if you need help to make some needed changes. Wherever you’re at as a parent, you’ll find some great info and suggestions for helping your kids use technology in a way that doesn’t interfere with their relationships with people around them.

I received this book free for purposes of my review. All opinions are my own.

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52 Uncommon Dates – Review

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52 Uncommon Dates: A Couple’s Adventure Guide for Praying, Playing, and Staying Together by Randy Southern with an introduction by Gary Chapman.

This book has some creative, fun, and imaginative date ideas. 52 ideas, to be exact.

Each date has a description, suggestions for how to accomplish the date, talking points, and suggestions for prayer and scripture reading.

I like that all of these date suggestions are different. Some are very involved and would require you to go somewhere and even plan a night away. Which is super hard for us to do these days with the kids. So I’ll save them for later.

Other dates are fun things that we could do in the evening after the kids are in bed. Plan a special snack, have our date activity, and spend some intentional time bonding as a couple doing something together that we both enjoy doing. The talking points with each date are great for going deeper into our relationship than just the activity that we’re participating in.

With work and kids we honestly don’t spend a ton of intentional time together. And we’ve used this book to schedule a couple of fun dates while the kids sleep – because, if it’s not on our calendar, it doesn’t happen.

And this book gives us something fun to do on our date, instead of just eating dinner and looking at each other with that “what now?” expression and then settling for Netflix.

If your looking for some fun new date ideas. You’ll find some fun ideas in this book!

I received this book free for purposes of my review. All opinions are my own. This post does contain affiliate links.

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The 5 Love Languages of Children

IMG_20150312_083230216I just finished ready “The 5 Love Languages of Children” by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell.

I’m already familiar with the 5 Love Languages for adults so I was excited to get to review this book. As a mother with 3 children I’ve already noticed a difference in how each of them relate to me and others around them.

First of all, I was a little disappointed to realize that children need to be 6 or so before you can figure out what their love language is, though, this does make sense, because really you don’t start seeing much independence until kids are about 6. My oldest is 6 so for her, I can figure out what her love language is.

For little kids it can be as simple as role playing, as in “how would Suzie’s mom show her that she loves her in this situation?” Or “what’s something I did today that showed you that I love you?”.

For the younger kids (and my 6yr old), I’ll do what the book encouraged me to do, just show love in all 5 languages because it’s so important for kids to know they’re loved! Also, this will be a great book to read again in a couple of years just to see where we’re at then and remind me of ways to show love to my children.

Even if you’re kids aren’t old enough, this book has great suggestions for showing love to your children in all 5 love languages in all the different stages of their life. In fact, the authors often break suggestions down into age groups – which I found extremely helpful! Because how you show love to a 6yr old is often different than how you can show the same kind of love to your teenager.

For example, we were watching a movie the other night that scared my 6yr old. She spent the entire movie snuggled on the couch with me. This is unlikely to be a teenagers response or need when watching a scary movie.

I would recommend this book to parents of kids of all ages. It’s an easy book to read and it contains a lot of practical and helpful advice.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for purposes of my review.