Why I Wrote this Book
A few years ago I met a woman who called me to ask for career advice. She had a good job in a big corporation. This woman’s parents were Mexican immigrants who drove to Michigan in the summers to pick apples and drove home to Texas to work in citrus plants in the winter. Her mother did not speak English.
This woman and her brothers went to school in Texas and she went to Day Care in Michigan in the summers. She went on to college, graduated, moved to Spain for two years, married a banker and moved back to the United States.
I wondered how this woman had become so successful with a good education, job, husband and family after growing up in a difficult environment.
Later, in Ohio, I met a woman who was 19 or 20 whose parents had come to the US from Nigeria with no money. They had a family of six children. Both parents worked and the children helped take care of each other. They were so poor that one night they had to move from one house to another and had only garbage bags to stuff their clothes into.
Now she was a sophomore at Harvard University, well on her way to a successful career. I wondered how she did it. How did she come out of a childhood of poverty and wind up at one of the best universities in the country?
I looked further and met a three-quarter blood American Indian in Oklahoma who had grown up on a reservation, gone to the reservation school until 8th grade, then to a boarding school, went to college, got a good job as an engineer and ended up as Chairman of the Board of a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Following that, I found similar stories about people who had come from difficult backgrounds and accomplished a lot in their lives. I did research on how to raise children that would grow up to be smart, healthy, happy and financially successful. I was trying to find out what made these people turn out so well. The result of this work was the little book “Raising Great Children: Ten Tips from a Grandfather.”
Many excellent books have been written about how to raise children. Some of them are stories about successful people and others are research findings or advice from experts, such as doctors, teachers or child care professionals. Most of them are 200 or 300 pages long, however, and it is difficult for busy parents to find time to read long books.
This book is brief, simple and straightforward, yet it covers many important points about how to be a good parent. It can be used by parents alone, or in discussion groups with other parents, or as a guide for other reading to find more about any one topic.
Please read this book and try out the ideas. I wish you the best of luck in your adventure of raising your children. Remember that all kids are amazing and have the potential to live great lives.