I Can Do That With My Kid!
 Rhonda Kehlbeck, Ph. D.
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 All My Heart Press
  ISBN: 0971458308


Family Activities to Encourage Reading, Writing, Communication & Positive Self-Esteem in Children.

It's vitally important to satisfy early in their lives, our children's appetite for learning, long before their first day in kindergarten. Like learning a language, which children accomplish with ease, learning to make things with their hands, memorize things, participate in creating things, comes easily to our inquisitive little monkeys.

Parenting or babysitting is much, much more than sticking the ratpack in front of a television or computer, where they will only learn to become passive, suppressed, mental drones. Too soon, their small motor skills, their brains, & their enthusiasm to explore the world about them, will become dulled & as flabby & out of tone as their bodies.

Watching a flickering screen, is not the same as hands-on interfacing with real live family members in real time activities with real tactile materials.

Along comes ebullient Rhonda Kehlbeck & her I Can Do That With My Kid!

•If you are at the end of your rope of ideas to entertain & teach your kids.
•If you are faced with a winter's worth of house-bound days, when you know the relentless noise of the tele will drive you nuts.
•If you are on a strict budget & have nothing to spare for fancy supplies.
•If you are at a loss as to how you're going to fill up those hungry little minds, with interesting & creative projects. Then, I Can Do That With My Kid! is the book for you!

It is reader-friendly, rather like having Mary Poppins pop in with her dose of sugar to help the medicine go down in the form of fun, unusual & inexpensive projects to be doing with your kiddipoos, when you're all cooped up together, while the wind howls, the rain pours & the snow falls.

So much of what Dr. Kehlbeck has to teach is summarized in one simple sentence: When raising your children, stay focused on the job at hand.
If the criteria for a good school teacher is to be focused, why can't a parent do the same?
Part of the reason why not, of course, is that parents are the bottle fillers/washers, diaper buyers/changers, food preparers/bussers, nannies & nurses, house/garden keepers, sibling referees, & family judges. Someone also has to earn the family's keep!

By the time your children get to kindergarten, they are supposed to have learnt a variety of social skills, as well as a slew of fine & gross motor skills that will allow them to cooperate & participate in a group setting, without bringing along their private slave/valet/maid/nanny. Who teaches them these skills?

Parents do. That's what parents are for, it's in the fine print, it is the bottom line!

Every parent needs all the help they can get, & I Can Do That With My Kid! is an excellent resource. Not only does it teach you new “games” to play with your children -- remember -- “monkey see, monkey do” -- we humans learn by playing “games” & practicing what their grownups are doing -- I Can Do That With My Kid! also teaches us how to enjoy family life, & life with our children.

I Can Do That With My Kid! is a good book not only for parents -- consider giving copies to your favorite babysitters, nanny & your children's grandparents...so you're all on the same page, so to speak!

My one “kvetch”? It should have been printed like a cookbook -- easy to open & lay flat while following it's treasure trails.
(10/13/02)

Rebecca