Product Description

Safety skills for children outside the home
Warning signs of sexual abuse
How to screen baby-sitters and choose schools
Strategies for keeping teenagers safe from violence

All parents face the same challenges when it comes to their children's safety: whom to trust, whom to distrust, what to believe, what to doubt, what to fear, and what not to fear. In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the nation's leading expert on predicting violent behavior and author of the monumental bestseller The Gift of Fear, offers practical new steps to enhance children's safety at every age level, giving you the tools you need to allow your kids freedom without losing sleep yourself. With daring and compassion, he shatters the widely held myths about danger and safety and helps parents find some certainty about life's highest-stakes questions:

How can I know a baby-sitter won't turn out to be someone who harms my child? (see page 103)
What should I ask child-care professionals when I interview them? (see page 137)
What's the best way to prepare my child for walking to school alone? (see page 91)
How can my child be safer at school? (see page 175)
How can I spot sexual predators? (see page 148)
What should I do if my child is lost in public? (see page 86)
How can I teach my child about risk without causing too much fear? (see page 98)
What must my teenage daughter know in order to be safe? (see page 191)
What must my teenage son know in order to be safe? (see page 218)
And finally, in the face of all these questions, how can I reduce the worrying? (see page 56)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20584 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05
• Released on: 2000-05-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780440509004
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Be warned: In many ways this is a terrifying book. It deals with a subject--violence against children--that most of us never want to consider. But, as Gavin de Becker stresses, such situations, though rare, can occur, so all parents must deal with the facts in order to protect their children properly. De Becker's aim is to create awareness of potential dangers and provide parents with the knowledge necessary for prevention and control. As he emphatically states in Protecting the Gift, much of this knowledge is already hard-wired in the form of intuition: "This natural ability is deep, brilliant, powerful. Nature's greatest accomplishment, the human brain, is stunningly efficient when its host is at risk, but when one's child is at risk, it moves to a whole new level, one we can justifiably call miraculous." The trick, he stresses, is trusting and acting on intuition.

In this valuable, even necessary, book, he shatters many myths about the typical profiles of regular offenders and the prevalence of such problems as sexual abuse and kidnapping. He also deconstructs the wisdom of traditional maxims such as "Never talk to strangers" and "If you are ever lost, go to a policeman." Without offering a compendium of every conceivable danger, he identifies warning signals and real risks that are often easy to spot once you know what to look for. He offers practical advice on recognizing signs of sexual abuse, choosing a baby sitter or nanny, how to prepare kids for walking to school alone, and how to teach children about potential risks without making them afraid to venture out of the house. And he continually stresses that denial and ignoring intuition are the biggest mistakes that parents make in protecting their kids from those that mean them harm. Well written and infinitely informative, Protecting the Gift affords parents more confidence and less reason for unnecessary worry. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
Dostoyevski said that child abuse is evil because it destroys a childs faith in the goodness of God. In this painstakingly practical yet impassioned guide, de Becker, author of last years bestselling The Gift of Fear, demonstrates that a child who was himself abused can grow up to be a vigilant protector of the gift of childrens innate faith in the goodness of life. Writing with a precision honed from his long experience as a security expert predicting violence in order to protect high-profile clients, and with a depth born of his own childhood understanding of how it feels to be hurt by the adult you love, de Becker describes how we can keep our children safe. Although he devotes separate chapters to the special threats facing children and teens, females and males (the murderous romance of boys and guns is covered), his basic message is encapsulated in 12 steps. Echoing his previous book, the first step involves teaching children to honor their feelingsspecifically, the intuition that makes them fear certain people. Children also need a parents permission to be assertive, to defy adults, to yell and fully resist. Throughout, de Becker stresses a childs need to trust that a parent will be open to listen about any experience, no matter how unpleasant. He opens and concludes with tales of ordinary mothers who overcame their doubts and inhibitions to experience a brilliantly intuitive wild brain as they fought off attackers to protect their children. De Becker offers a guide to fostering this fierce intelligence in our kids, ourselves and our society. Everyone in contact with children should read this important book. It can help save lives. BOMC, QPB and Childrens BOMC featured alternates; first serial to USA Weekend; second serial to Good Housekeeping; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In De Becker's well-received first book on anticipating, avoiding, and preventing personal violence, he wrote about The Gift of Fear (1997) and encouraged regarding fearful feelings as warnings to be heeded rather than rationalized away. In this book, he still encourages that practice and still valorizes intuition as the reliable matrix out of which fear arises. The gift of this book's title is not, however, an intangible emotion, but one's very tangible children. After opening chapters on intuition, worry--which he thinks is more distracting than useful--and the ingratiating tactics of child abductors and molesters, De Becker turns to specific aspects of protecting children. When children should talk to strangers, how to let children cooperate in their own protection as they grow, hiring baby-sitters, choosing safe day-care, guarding against pedophiles, ensuring safety at school, helping teenage girls deal with boys, dealing with boys and guns, spotting violence-prone boys' friendships, and intervening in intrafamilial violence--each gets a very cogent, accessible chapter's attention. Certain truths, borne out by statistics, are stated repeatedly: almost 100 percent of child molesters are heterosexual men; the preponderance of molestation is committed by family members and close friends; and boys and men are exponentially more likely to be violent than girls and women. Although he uses plenty of sobering and sometimes tragic true stories as springboards for teaching, De Becker avoids fearmongering and paranoia, pointing out that humans are the most successful species we know at raising offspring safely to maturity. This is top-drawer child-rearing stuff. Ray Olson

Customer Reviews

Don't Procrastinate!
I hate reading anything that makes me feel anxious and initially this book sat on the shelf for weeks before I actually picked it up. I was so glad I did because there is such valuable information in here and I actually feel better about my child's safety than I did before.

Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe and Parents Sane is about how to teach your child to trust her instincts when it comes to safety. Since 90% of child abuse and abductions occur by people well-known to your child, teaching her to talk to strangers just doesn't work. Instead, the author gives you detailed and logical steps to take, starting as early as toddlerhood, so you'll know how to help your child learn to follow her instincive feelings about whether someone is safe or not.

Crucial information about how to be prepared for (God forbid but we should all be prepared just in case) the event that your child may be seperated from you in public. Examples include making a daily detailed mental note of the clothing your child is wearing, keeping large photocopies of your child's picture and name in your purse/wallet so you can hand them out to security personel within seconds of your child's disappearance and an action plan for immediate implementation.

There is SO much in this book - every bit of it worth reading so you can protect your child - and I can't recommend it strongly enough. Read it NOW and be prepared.

If you care about kids, you should read this book!
Gavin De Becker's new book is a valuable and important extension of his excellent "The Gift of Fear." I teach high school psychology and had my classes read TGOF, which proved to be an eye-opening, empowering tool for teenagers. "Protecting the Gift" expands on these ideas by specifically focusing on child and teenager safety. While I agree with some minor criticisms that the new book repeats some older material, the repeated material is worth hearing again, and the new book provides the most thoughtful and specific advice I have heard on how to talk to children about self-protection. As I new parent, I am grateful for De Becker's instructions. My own parents are wonderful, but as I suspect is true of the vast majority of families, they never talked to me as a child about how to recognize, prevent, and report sexual abuse--or how to trust my intuition and say no to adults in any number of questionable circumstances. By teaching us how to engage in this dialogue, De Becker is doing the public a great service!

I really recommend this book!
My one diappointment with this book was that so many of the anecdotes were straight out of his first book, THE GIFT OF FEAR. Given his extraordinarily broad range of experiences, surely Gavin de Becker could have served up something fresher (shame on his editors, too). Aside from that, however, this is a terrific book, worth every penny -- and more. One key nugget of advice he gives is to tell children that when lost, seek out someone, preferably a woman, for help -- the point being that women are more likely to be helpful, and that when a child chooses someone he is less likely to be victimized than when someone else chooses him. Sounds obvious -- and yet, most people tell their kids "don't talk to strangers". This advice applies to adults as well -- choose before you are chosen. This is all good old fashioned common sense, but we don't always recognize it until someone like de Becker points it out. And he has, so very well. Thank you Gavin de Becker, and I hope you'll write more books with more (new) stories.