Customer Reviews

Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane)

5 star:		(107)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I hate reading anything that makes me feel anxious and initially this book sat on the shelf for weeks before I actually picked it up. I was so glad I did because there is such valuable information in here and I actually feel better about my child's safety than I did before.

Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe and Parents Sane is about how to teach your child to trust her instincts when it comes to safety. Since 90% of child abuse and abductions occur by people well-known to your child, teaching her to talk to strangers just doesn't work. Instead, the author gives you detailed and logical steps to take, starting as early as toddlerhood, so you'll know how to help your child learn to follow her instincive feelings about whether someone is safe or not.

Crucial information about how to be prepared for (God forbid but we should all be prepared just in case) the event that your child may be seperated from you in public. Examples include making a daily detailed mental note of the clothing your child is wearing, keeping large photocopies of your child's picture and name in your purse/wallet so you can hand them out to security personel within seconds of your child's disappearance and an action plan for immediate implementation.

There is SO much in this book - every bit of it worth reading so you can protect your child - and I can't recommend it strongly enough. Read it NOW and be prepared.

Gavin De Becker's new book is a valuable and important extension of his excellent "The Gift of Fear." I teach high school psychology and had my classes read TGOF, which proved to be an eye-opening, empowering tool for teenagers. "Protecting the Gift" expands on these ideas by specifically focusing on child and teenager safety. While I agree with some minor criticisms that the new book repeats some older material, the repeated material is worth hearing again, and the new book provides the most thoughtful and specific advice I have heard on how to talk to children about self-protection. As I new parent, I am grateful for De Becker's instructions. My own parents are wonderful, but as I suspect is true of the vast majority of families, they never talked to me as a child about how to recognize, prevent, and report sexual abuse--or how to trust my intuition and say no to adults in any number of questionable circumstances. By teaching us how to engage in this dialogue, De Becker is doing the public a great service!

While expecting our first baby and then as new parents, my wife and I received loads of excellent advice from friends and family regarding childbirth, doctors, baby-care, day-care, formula brands, etc. Last week, as a father with 8 weeks of experience in parenting, I had my first opportunity to offer advice to an expectant parent. I suggested she visit two day care centers I had liked, visit the pediatrician my wife and I chose, and read Protecting the Gift by Gavin de Becker.

Gavin de Becker makes his living predicting and preventing violent behavior. His firm provides security and consultation to celebrities, athletes, world leaders, the CIA, U. S. Supreme Court and other security organizations around the world.

In Protecting the Gift, de Becker introduces parents to startling statistics revealing the violent reality of our culture: one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually molested by the time they reach adulthood; 90 percent of sexual abuse is committed by someone the child knows; the most common age that sexual abuse begins is when the child is three years old. Most parents live with a mindset that denies or ignores this reality. But as de Becker shows in his book, our children are living in this reality everyday.

De Becker's purpose in this book is two-fold: 1) to hit parents in the face with the real dangers awaiting children, and 2) to teach parents how to avoid fruitless worry and to take meaningful steps to protect children. On both points, de Becker succeeds.

Parents are raising children during an age when an FBI child-pornography sting indicts teachers, coaches, pastors and judges. It is an age of guns and date-rape drugs. At the same time, many parents experience an urgent need for help in raising children, often from the age of six-weeks onward. Parents look for family, day care workers, sitters, schools, nannies and friends to provide support in raising children. How can parents assure their children's safety?

De Becker addresses this question by first focusing on the fact that violent behavior can be predicted. The book teaches that children can be taught skills to avoid dangerous situations and people. He emphasizes the development and use of intuition as a parent's key resource in recognizing threats. He cites numerous stories of people avoiding harm by listening to intuition and others who ignored intuition and became victims.
De Becker shares many practical lessons. He teaches what to look for in safe child-care workers and sitters. He lists the signs that indicate a dangerous stranger versus a friendly stranger. He also illustrates ways that well-meaning parents do things that increase a child's vulnerabilities.

The Bible teaches that wolves dress in sheep's clothing and that evil-doers masquerade as angels of light. Nothing fits this description more precisely than a sexual predator of children. De Becker teaches that pedophiles and rapists often gain the confidence of their victims through being overly "nice" and "helpful." They have to do this. How else can a pedophile convince parents to trust him or her with their children. Over and over, we see that pedophiles go to where they can have access to children and, like chameleons, blend in perfectly.
I think people in the church today are especially susceptible to this type of criminal, because the presence of evil has been downplayed and we are usually willing to give people the benefit of the doubt and accept them at face-value. De Becker shows parents how to remove doubt and to know who can and cannot be trusted.

There are several other topics in this book that I think are important to parents. The book cover summarizes one of de Becker's purposes in writing it: "By showing what danger really looks like-as opposed to what we might imagine it looks like-de Becker gives parents freedom from many common worries and unwarranted fears."

A lasting impression I take from the book is that the people with whom I and my family interact are who they are not who I want them to be. I know that some people are influenced by perverse and evil desires aimed at children. Because of this truth, I think it is important that parents read this book. I also suggest that adults, especially women, read de Becker's bestseller The Gift of Fear.

Craig Stephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays

I enjoyed most of this book but was quite surprised by the information in the back that children with autism can be dangerous and may become dangerous adults. First of all, most children with autism are extremely literal and incapable of lying or deceit. They are also unlikely to plot an attack or to be bullies of any kind because they tend to be shy and wary of people and the last thing they would want to do is initiate a contact.

Autistic children often do have sensory issues, and they might RESPOND inappropriately, i.e., if you accidentally (or deliberately) bump an autistic child at the water fountain they may overreact by yelling, screaming, or pushing/hitting you back. But this is still quite different from an autistic child masterminding how to hurt another child or being a predator - something that I seriously doubt has ever happened. And if it has, then it is less a symptom of the child's AUTISM and more a symptom of other problems the child might have - the same problems that would motivate ANY child to hurt someone else.

Well anyway, on balance I think this is a very good book with useful ideas about trusting your instincts.

My one diappointment with this book was that so many of the anecdotes were straight out of his first book, THE GIFT OF FEAR. Given his extraordinarily broad range of experiences, surely Gavin de Becker could have served up something fresher (shame on his editors, too). Aside from that, however, this is a terrific book, worth every penny -- and more. One key nugget of advice he gives is to tell children that when lost, seek out someone, preferably a woman, for help -- the point being that women are more likely to be helpful, and that when a child chooses someone he is less likely to be victimized than when someone else chooses him. Sounds obvious -- and yet, most people tell their kids "don't talk to strangers". This advice applies to adults as well -- choose before you are chosen. This is all good old fashioned common sense, but we don't always recognize it until someone like de Becker points it out. And he has, so very well. Thank you Gavin de Becker, and I hope you'll write more books with more (new) stories.

I am a big fan of Gavin De Becker. I found "The Gift of Fear" helpful, intelligent and, often, frighteningly insightful. I have recommended it many times. That said, I am sad to report that I think it extremely misleading to present "Protecting The Gift" as a new book. Anecdotes aren't just warmed over, they're served up word for word. Whole chunks of chapters are identical to the first book, with only subjects changed to refer to parents and children rather than to adults. I rushed to buy this book and my advice is, if you have the first one, don't bother. As honorable as De Becker's mission seems to be, I'd say his editor and publisher are responsible for a pretty major consumer rip-off. Only the appendices seem new

I almost gave this book four stars, but only because it has a few flaws, where De Becker's THE GIFT OF FEAR was not only flawless, but taught me more than any one book has ever taught me. Still, this is a powerful book. I read it without stopping for sleep, so I can assure you that it is indeed well written.

De Becker shows parents and other adults every facet of possible victimization of children and how to avoid it. When he is teaching his readers, which is always, he uses brilliant examples that we can all relate to. Take this as an example: "I would ask which is sillier: waiting a moment for the next elevator, or placing her child and herself into a soundproof sterel chamber with a stranger she is afraid of?" Succinctly, he teaches, in that one sentence, so much. How many times have all of us pushed ourselves into an elevator with someone who made us afraid?

De Becker's challenge is to empower us as parents, and empower us he does, just as he empowered us in THE GIFT OF FEAR. He instructs us all on using our intuition to make life or death decisions. I can still recall a time when my son, then just very small, and I were staying at a luxurious hotel. We went to the top-floor pool and walked right into a burglary. How I managed to get myself and my son out of there calmly and completely is a testament to De Becker's lessons on the incredible strength of a mother whose baby is threatened.

De Becker teaches us all new ways of thinking and new ways of being and new ways of protecting our children and ourselves from abuse, abduction, violence, crime.

De Becker's appendices are worthwhile, too, with listings of excellent books and important organizations.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone who loves a baby, child, or adolescent.

What a masterpiece! A must read for EVERY female and EVERY parent. Gavin De Becker's writing flows easily and is very compelling. After reading this book I feel less fearful and more confident about protecting both myself and my children from many types of predators (kidnappers, rapists, etc.), and you will too. You will be more informed about which crimes you and your children are most vulnerable to, and you will learn the statistics as well as what to do to protect yourself.

You'd think, being a 25-year-old girl with a peaceful past (aside from having a loving, unviolent but drug-addicted mother--thankfully blessed with a single, first-time father who somehow knew how to do everything right), that this book wouldn't serve me at all. I have no children yet, and have experienced blessedly minimal trauma in my life. Few deaths in my small family, even from natural causes, have spared me from the fear most have earned from the terrible experiences that life has to offer.

But it seemed all of my life that fear prevailed. It was the fear that preceeded the constant, daily worry that I was long overdue for something awful to happen to me, and that the only thing I couldn't prevent was the outside interaction of some terrible predator.

Gavin de Becker's books were recommended to me by my new boss, and I have to say I have rarely gotten such sage advice in my life before. Though I am not a parent, this book (along with "The Gift of Fear") have provided me with one vital piece of information that has all but cured me of my irrational worries about the world: we are human, but we are far more capable of protecting ourselves than we realize, and protecting our children is just as simple.

Having read this book, I who was once a girl terrified to leave the front stoop of her home know that I can not only live my own life, but someday have my own children and know that I am capable of not only raising them in a healthy, aware existence, but know that I am fully capable of someday being the fierce lioness that protects them.

De Becker is the only one I trust on this topic. He is dead-on accurate. Are you tired of the simplistic & false 'don't talk to strangers' type platitudes? He dispells them & gives you something much better. The truth.
It takes time and critical thinking to REALLY prepare our children to be safe. De Becker thinks it through & relates it with clarity. Don't waste your time with the 'stranger-danger; good touch/bad touch' stuff.

ALSO: Although his first book, "The Gift of Fear" is also excellent, this one does stand alone just fine.