Your Child's Strengths

Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them

By: Jenifer Fox M.Ed.

Narrated by: Renee Raudman

With this groundbreaking work, educator Jenifer Fox is poised to change the conversation about education in America. 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 25 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 you approach and 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.

©2008 Jenifer Fox (P)2008 Tantor

Critic reviews

"Jenifer Fox has vision, passion, intelligence, and experience. All show in Your Child's Strengths." (Christopher Peterson, Professor of Psychology, and author of A Primer in Positive Psychology)
"This is a brilliant, innovative, enormously practical, and hugely important work. Truly, this book could change the world." (Edward Hallowell, M.D., author of Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction)

Impassioned argument for strengths-based education

Ms. Fox writes well and makes a compelling argument in favor of a strengths-based educational system. In fact this argument consumes the first 30-50% of the book.

In contrast to "Now Discover Your Strengths", this book does not cite a lot of research. Nor does it offer a list of strengths patterns that children might fall into. Instead it offers Ms. Fox's anecdotes and impressions on what is the best way to coach an adolescent to come to "strengths epiphanies". These coaching tidbits are interspersed in the book.

The audiobook form includes a reading of a long workbook at the end. I did not get a lot out of listening to this. It refers a number of times to figures on the audio CD, which naturally is not available if you downloaded the digital version.

My heart written in a book!

I love this. This book captures all my feeling about our current school system! It also captures my passion to see my children use their strengths and to become the best them! What a transformation our schools could make in our world through all our children if we adopted this!

Not getting to the point whatsoever

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

Up until chapter 13 of 21, no useful info was given, except advertising the cause and telling plenty of personal stories. Not through with the book, but falling almost asleep while listening, performance is saddening.

What could Jenifer Fox have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Get to the point

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Waste of time, worse even, people who bought this book in order to invest in their childs development now have less funds available for actual helpful material and might be so frustrated with this topic that they won't try a better coaching or book.