Customer Reviews

Pick Up Your Socks, And Other Skills Growing Children Need!: A Practical Guide to Raising Responsible Children

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No parent wants to raise a child who is a slob, a couch potato and a brat. But how to help them grow from a toddler to a responsible teen is a daunting task. This book helps parents get a gameplan for teaching their children self-respect as well as respect for others. It also reduces frustration by helping you see what is realistic for different ages. With large doses of humor and many practical tips, this is a VERY helpful book.

Your children's college roommates and future spouses will thank you... :)

I recommend this book all the time to friends who complain about having lazy kids. My son's hardly perfect, but he's done his own laundry since he was 4! This book helps you figure out what to reasonably expect and how to get the whole family to participate (so that you don't have to nag). It's great--even if cleaning house isn't your life's focus. It has tons of information about learning styles, developmental stages, and so on.

Elizabeth Crary really impressed me. This book was very well structured with content logically presented for parents to assist their children in developing skills and then developing self-motivation. She provides ample references to other authors for further reading as well.

Our child is in pre-school. We have just about finished potty training, and have told him how proud we are when he makes. I learned in this book how important it is that we verbalize that we are proud of him and he should be proud of himself as well.

Most of the material in the book is for children older than preschool but there is plenty here for preschool parents to think about. We will refer to this book for many years to come. I am definitely interested in reading more books by Elizabeth Crary. I highly recommend this book!

This is a must for all parents of young children, saves you a bunch of headaches, gives you good tools to work with.

This book has some great information for all parents and also makes you think about the choices you make as a parent. The chore chart is amazingly helpful and I have used in many times as an example of what it appropriate in terms of skill development.

I just finished reading "Pick Up Your Socks... and other skills growing children need!: A Practical Guide to Raising Responsible Children" by Elizabeth Crary. We use some of her books for preschool children and their parents at work, so I picked up this one when I saw it at a used bookstore. It's old enough that I thought it might be out of print, but it looks like Amazon has it in stock.

Anyway, it's really interesting -- more than being just about chores, it's also about practical ways of doing gentle discipline with school-aged kids and teens, helping them become internally motivated, etc. It also has what I thought was some useful info on the ages at which kids are commonly able to start doing different chores with help, doing it on their own with reminders, and doing it on their own completely independently. It's a very practical, tips-based book, with detailed examples that take into account different learning and communication styles. It also takes into account the idea that different families will have different values and goals for their kids, and so definitely isn't coming from that too-often irritating attitude of "XYZ is what will be best for all families".

This is, in my opinion, a well written and helpful book that offer practical solutions. It raises important issues such as allowance systems, effective communication skills, consequences and limits, contains helpful advice on teaching children problem solving skills, memory skills, makes point that every child is different and what worked with one may not work with his sibling! It will require an effort from the parents to develop the system, make the decisions and stick to them (this is the stage I am now on, so I cannot report on any progress yet). I hope that when I start implement the advise given in the book, it will help to eliminate a lot of pressure from the everyday family life.

I knew I'd spent too many years picking up after my kids because it was "easier" than fighting them to do it. I thought this book would provide me with some practical strategies to begin teaching them to pick up after themselves (they are 3 and 6). I found this book read like a textbook. The information is good but it's very much presented like a college lecture. I had also hoped to get some ideas about what was age appropriate for them to do and didn't find much information along that line. Borrow it from the libary (that's where mine will be going).