Motivate Your Child Action Plan

A few months ago, I reviewed the Motivate Your Child book. This very helpful book focuses on helping children develop internal motivation rather than relying on parent-initiated behavior modification techniques.

I just had the opportunity to review the brand new Motivate Your Child Action Plan. This book takes the principles of Motivate Your Child and turns them into a step by step process to help you reach the heart of your child. The book includes access to 12 audio sessions—one per chapter. I found these very helpful, since the authors provided even more examples and ideas. Reading Motivate Your Child is not necessary to implement the Action Plan, but the Action Plan does suggest which chapters to read in Motivate Your Child for each topic if you’d like additional support.

Implementing any plan for change first requires identifying the problem, so this is where Motivate Your Child begins. The parent chooses one character quality that the child to needs work on, and develops a plan, using five motivators:

1. Firmness
2. Visioning
3. Teaching
4. Spiritual Energy/Prayer
5. Coaching

The child is involved in the process of change through frequent discussions and is encouraged to take responsibility for help develop a plan for change.

The interactive plan includes checklists and spaces to write out ideas, insights, and results. Instead of writing in the book, I used a notebook, thinking it would be easier to have everything together to look back on instead of thumbing through the book. If the book had not provided space to answer questions and document our journey, though, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the notebook.

I chose to focus on the character trait of “responsibility.” We defined responsibility as taking the initiate to complete schoolwork in a timely and conscientious manner and as remembering to clean bedroom and bathroom in the morning before breakfast and to keep them clean. The area of responsibility is broad, but I started the project by limiting it to something more manageable. We have been making some progress, although Emily has a long way to go. I think the visioning step was helpful to her as I explained that developing responsibility would allow her greater independence to make her own decisions, more privileges because I would trust her more, and less nagging from Mom. I have had to put forth more effort as well in being firm with consequences and making the effort to praise positive behavior, tying it to growth in responsibility. I’m hoping to achieve good results with the Motivate Your Child Action Plan and to begin work on another character trait soon.

Interested in learning more? The book is on sale right now ($29.95 or $36.99 for the original Motivate Your Child plus the Action Plan.) Use the coupon code, AP5BGT for an additional $5 off. The original Motivate Your Child e-book is currently on sale for $2.99 from May 18-20.

Also, the mega-giveaway that includes this book and lots of other goodies is still open until Wednesday.

I received this book to review in exchange for my honest opinion.