Product Description

An essential book for parents and teachers that explores how children’s individual strengths create success

With this groundbreaking work, educator Jenifer Fox is poised to change the conversation about education in this country. For too long, parents and teachers have focused on identifying and “fixing” kids’ weaknesses to improve academic performance. Passionately written and informed by Fox’s twenty-five years of experience, Your Child’s Strengths turns that flawed paradigm on its head. Fox’s strengths-based philosophy provides the tools to prepare kids for the future in a world that demands greater adaptability and creative thinking than ever before.

Your Child’s Strengths will give parents and teachers the tools to discover strengths in three main areas: Activity Strengths, the tasks that make you feel engaged and energized; Relationship Strengths, the things you do for and with others that make you feel valued and competent; and Learning Strengths, the unique ways we approachand understand new information. All three strengths work in tandem.

Pairing inspiring firsthand accounts of success with practical workbook tools and an outline of the award- winning Affinities Program Fox has implemented at her own school, this much- needed book is a user- friendly guide for parents, teachers, and administrators that will improve individual performance and an indispensable road map for young people and society to a future that plays to strengths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21151 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Fox, head of a girl's boarding school in New Jersey, writes about a strengths-based curriculum she developed and implemented with great success. She not only presents a workbook that can be utilized by educators and parents, but also offers a convincing argument in favor of over-turning outdated curriculums and teaching methods. Instead of focusing on weaknesses, Fox submits that children do far better when the focus is on their strengths. Childhood is for "creative dreaming," not preparation for standardized tests. Fox identifies three types of strengths: activity, learning and relationship strengths, and helps parents guide their children toward self-discovery, explaining that true strengths include not only what a child is good at, but what she enjoys and makes her feel strong. The book is written in a lively and engaging style, and sprinkled with anecdotes from Fox's teaching life and her own experiences as a student who was frustrated and uncomfortable in a traditional school setting. Clearly, writing is one of Fox's strengths, as is her inspiring passion for helping kids lead meaningful lives.
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Review
“When I was labeled ‘learning disabled,’ the educational system tried everything to fix me, from giving me purple-colored reading glasses to putting me through hundreds of hours of remediation. Through all these efforts to fix what was supposedly wrong with me, my strengths, gifts, and talents were not simply neglected or ignored, but negated. Jenifer Fox has taken a groundbreaking and important stand against the standardized deficit and remediation education that dominates the lives of millions of students. Philosophical yet extremely practical, innovative yet grounded in solid research on effective pedagogy, Your Child's Strengths is a must read for any student, parent and educator.”
—Jonathan Mooney author of The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal and Learning Outside the Lines

“Your Child's Strengths is a tonic for the regret one feels for all the children burdened by schools and a world preoccupied by weaknesses rather than strengths. Countless compelling stories illustrate vividly the theme, that focusing on children's strengths is the roadmap for all parents and teachers to give what we want inherently wish to provide: a means for children to find their own path. The Strengths Inventory and Affinities Program curriculum in the Appendix offer a remarkably practical means to start down the path and are worth a read by themselves, but then you would miss the journey of revelation the book evokes.”
—Patrick F. Bassett, President, National Association of Independent Schools

"Jenifer Fox has vision, passion, intelligence, and experience. All show in Your Child’s Strengths, which contains a wealth of practical ideas for parents and educators who want to encourage among children the strengths that make possible the good life."
—Christopher Peterson, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan and author of A Primer in Positive Psychology

"Your Child's Strengths puts in plain view what has been in front of us all along – that education and character development always do best to first identify and deepen strengths, rather than to first (and too often exclusively) focus on deficit and weaknesses. Fox's approach is more interesting, more effective, and ultimately more humane."
—Michael Riera, author of Staying Connected to Your Teenager: How to Keep Them Talking to You, and How To Hear What They’re Really Saying

“Your Child’s Strengths contains clear, interesting, step-by-step techniques for identifying and utilizing children’s cognitive and emotional strengths - an excellent starting point for any parent, teacher, or student who wants to take the more effective step of focusing on assets rather than liabilities. The wisdom contained in this remarkable volume will be a godsend, not only for those who are just beginning to try to understand a child’s learning style but also for those already battered by a misguided an educational system.”
—Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys

“This is a brilliant, innovative, enormously practical, and hugely important work. Where positive psychology and strength-based philosophies usually stumble, this book soars, namely, in practical application. If teachers and parents would all read this and implement its suggestions, our broken educational system would be fixed in no time. Truly, this book could change the world.”
—Edward Hallowell, M.D. author of Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood to Adulthood and Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

About the Author
Jenifer Fox, Med has worked in day and boarding schools, single sex and coed schools, as a teacher and administrator for twenty-five years. She is currently head of the Purnell School in Pottersville, New Jersey. She holds a BS in communications from the University of Wisconsin– Madison, an MA in English from Middlebury College, and an MEd in school administration from Harvard University.

Customer Reviews

Middle School Teacher Raves
As a career middle school teacher, I know how challenging it can be to manage a classroom full of diverse learners. It is easy to focus on "fixing" what is wrong with kids. What Fox does in this book is offer a practical program to build on students' strengths. She shows us how to discover them with great activities and exercises and also makes a strong case that building on student strengths lays the groundwork for students to improve their performance overall. In this age of standardization, this book provides a refreshing reminder to teachers and parents that kids are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be discovered. I, for one, am looking forward to sharing this book with the parents of kids I teach and using the exercises and ideas in it to partner with them to see our students in a new light. Great book, groundbreaking.

Your Child's Strengths by Jenifer Fox
What an excellent book for parents, educators, and just about everyone else too. "Your Child's Strengths" by Jenifer Fox is a well-structured, logical, and methodical plan for bringing out the best in children, while inculcating resiliance and responsibility to help them face the ups and downs ahead of them.

Fox uses well thought-out plans, exercises, and examples to help her target audience learn how to re-focus their senses to work WITH children rather than trying to work ON children. Her approach is designed to assist the parent or educator in acting as a guide to the child who discovers their own strengths. I'm sure anyone who has ever had or worked with a child can verify that truths which come from within are much more powerful and have much more staying power than those others 'teach' TO us. Learning to recognize your own strengths vice talents can be compared to recognizing small epiphanies that occur in your life when you are happy, pleased, and self-confident. In this respect, the book is a manual for recognizing personal strengths in ourselves as well as enabling our children to learn to recognize and work with their strengths.
Fox is careful to explain the both the concepts behind this strategy and the actions needed to carry it out. The first part of the book explains the reasoning and successes of this method. The second portion provides descriptions and examples for recognizing strengths and how to delve deeper than mere words by utilizing all our senses to pick up what children can't or won't say. The final chapters are literally a textbook with exercises, suggestions, and charts each reader can use.

Even the appendices have structure and use as they detail lists and writings to implement this process individually, in the family, in groups, and grade-by-grade in schools. There are also success stories and contacts available for readers.

As both a mother and an educator, I'm very encouraged after reading "Your Child's Strengths". Both parents looking for guidance and educators screaming for help (although maybe I should phrase that the other way around!) can use the truths laid out so diligently in Jenifer Fox's book to combat the negativity so prevalent around us and infecting our children. I'll certainly be recommending it to my fellow educators and close friends. After all, with so much to learn the target audience need not be restricted to parents and educators. Personal growth is not, and should not be, only a childhood experience.

Starting them on a Me Inc. journey
The older we get, the more we realize that life is a journey of discover into who we are; and those who help guide us along that path are called our most honored teachers. In this easy to read tutorial, educator Jenifer Fox relies on stories from her life and her life's work with children to demonstrate the importance of integrating that process into your child's education and then provides the how-to-do manual.

Arguing persuasively against systems that place all comers into a common box and then looks to identify failure (weakness) as the path to growth, Fox reminds us that we are all unique, individual beings with both weaknesses and strengths. Recognizing that our weaknesses are most often the underside of a powerful strength, educator Fox shows us how to use this strength base as a foundation for growth and learning - starting not when we are adults, but starting from an early age by incorporating this concept into our educational institutions. Recognizing that this strength positioning applies not just to students, but also to the teachers, Fox created an Affinities Program as an alternative to standardized teaching and testing methodologies.

Applying the well accepted "Head, Heart, & Hands" framework to strength understanding, Fox categorizes children's (adults too, for that matter) strengths as Learning, Relational, or Activity based, and provides examples and discovery techniques for each. If you have done any introspective analysis yourself, you will appreciate that a book cannot give the answers to your child's strengths, but this one will surely help you start them on that journey and integrate it into their educational development.

Do not be off-put by the nearly 350 pages. The book takes only 160 pages to present the usual problem/solution argument - an easy two sitting read. The next 75 pages are the how-to-do application piece for working with the child - a worthwhile book in its own right. By including the Affinities curriculum as an appendix to the book, Fox expanded the book beyond the usual < 250 page limit for the easy read designation - consider this your free gift when you buy the book.

This book is highly recommended for anyone who loves a child.

Dennis DeWilde, Author of "The Performance Connection"