Let Them Be Kids
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A Novel
by Jessica Smartt
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Release Date: June 9, 2020
Paperback: 256 Pages
Publisher Description
As every parent hopes to raise kids with good manners and values, Jessica Smartt’s practical guide fills the gaps of uncertainty and provides tips on how parents can equip their children in purity, faith, and creativity.
Former English teacher and homeschooling mother of three, Jessica Smartt felt the weight of helping prepare her kids for life, especially with all the outside pressures and influence of the world. She struggled with how she could raise her children with a sense of adventure, self-confidence, manners, faith, and the ability to utilize technology wisely.
Let Them Be Kids is Jessica’s offering of grace and confidence to moms, giving them practical ideas to meet these challenges.
Her well-researched, tested methods, woven together with her personal stories and witty humor, deliver wisdom on the tough topics of life, such as
- family time vs. outside activities,
- being “cool” or not,
- boredom,
- technology usage
- sexual purity, and
- showing grace when kids disobey.
Part story and part guidebook, every chapter includes doable strategies and encouragement for the journey.
Let Them Be Kids helps moms feel confident and equipped with ways to provide a safe, healthy, Christ-centered childhood for their children. It leads them to conquer fear and find truth that transforms them and their families as it reminds them how to enjoy and cherish the special memory-making moments of building family values together.
About the author
Jessica Smartt is a former English teacher turned homeschooling mama of three. A week after her first baby was born, she began her motherhood blog “Smartter” Each Day. Jessica and her husband live in beautiful North Carolina, where she loves hiking with kids (mostly), steaming coffee in the afternoon, family bike rides, and anything that’s ever been done to a potato.
CONNECT WITH JESSICA: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Excerpt
Most of us are not raising children who carry a past with profound levels of trauma. (Although some of us are, and to those of you, I say a prayer that you feel the strength for this incredible job. You have my deep respect.) But while many of us are not raising children who experienced complex trauma, none of us have unvarnished children with perfect habits. We have children for whom we wish we could do this differently or that differently. We have kids who have seen things we wish they hadn’t seen or know things we wish they didn’t know. We have kids who have developed habits we wish they hadn’t developed. We may be tempted to feel we are reading some of this too late to help.
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For instance, kids who have been addicted to video games can become unaddicted and instead learn to love being outside. Kids who never enjoyed children’s classics such as Little House on the Prairie or The Boxcar Children can learn to read them and enjoy them. Even kids who don’t have grit or manners can learn either—or both. There is hope for childhood. Not in the abstract, blank slate of future children but in your children, the ones in your home. As you read, promise me that you will not lose hope. The virtues you read about here are powerful and real and worth fighting to regain. Do not despair. Change is possible. Taken from “Let Them Be Kids” by Jessica Smartt. Copyright 2020 by Jessica Smartt. Used with permission from www.thomasnelson.com
- We can learn, or relearn, how to enjoy simple pleasures.
- We can build new habits.
- Innocence can be restored.
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