There are a lot of books on parenting out there. Most of them have at least a nugget of wisdom that you can use. But few deliver the bang for the buck that I got out of reading Nurturing the Leader Within Your Child: What Every Parent Needs to Know by Dr. Tim Elmore. Don’t worry, the prose inside isn’t nearly so cumbersome as the title.
Nurturing the Leader Within Your Child (let’s just call it NtLWYC) is written from a Christian perspective, but it isn’t preachy. The book isn’t about saving your soul. It is all about leadership and how to prepare your child to assume the role of leader. There are two things that set NtLWYC apart from the mountains of parenting books on the shelves (and increasingly in the discount bins).
First, the book is focused like a laser on one singular aspect of parenting. Elmore doesn’t try to provide an all-in-one parenting omnibus. He tackles only one issue in this book – developing the leadership potential within your child. Although there are many peripheral benefits to be gained from the insights within the book, the focus remains squarely on the goal stated within the title.
Second, NtLWYC is more attainable and applicable than your typical parenting guide book. Elmore does digress into theory from time to time; it’s hard to go 220 pages without doing so. But I found nearly every chapter contained concrete actions that I could take to reach my parenting goal of inspiring the leader within my son.
Like many things in life, you’ll get out of the study questions at the end of each chapter in proportion to what you put into them. You could easily gloss over them casually if you choose, but if you want to dig deep with them, they’ll take you places beyond the scope of the book. From the very first query at the end of the first chapter that questioned my own motivations for undertaking this quest, I found the Reflect and Respond questions to be an excellent starting point for both introspection and outward actions.
NtLWYC has been out for ten years now, and other than a few dated references (when is the last time you heard anyone talk about Norman Schwarzkopf?) it stands up well among more recent works on the subject.
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