7 Tools for Cultivating Your Child's Potential

7 Tools for Cultivating your Child’s Potential, by Zan Tyler. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2005. 238pp. $14.95 ISBN: 0805440208.

Originally published in The Christian Librarian 50:43-44 2007.

Zan Tyler has been a home schooling mother, lobbyist, and a spokesperson for home schooling for over twenty years. She and her husband, Joe, founded the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools in 1990 and Zan served as its president for 10 years. She is the Home school Resource and Media Consultant for Broadman & Holman Publishers and the Home school Editor for LifeWay.com. Zan speaks on a wide variety of home schooling topics and finds it one of her greatest joys in life to encourage other home schooling mothers.

7 Tools for Cultivating your Child’s Potential is divided into eight chapters: Chapter 1: A Vision for Preparation, Education, and Cultivation; Chapter 2: Establishing Identity; Chapter 3: Cultivating Intimacy; Chapter 4: Discovering Purpose; Chapter 5: Developing Worldview; Chapter 6: Building Character through Discipleship; Chapter 7: Providing Stimulating Academics; Chapter 8: Fostering Leadership and Communication Skills. The epilogue contains personal testimonies of the home schooling experience of her three children. In the appendix, Zan describes her home schooling journey over the last twenty years.

The book’s purpose is to teach parents how to maximize their child’s potential spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and vocationally. Tyler presents biblical principles that will help parents to raise “dynamic, successful children” who love the Lord and each other. It also present ways to pass on the biblical worldview to our children. She believes that “God has appointed the home as the place where true education occurs and where learning flourishes best.” Tyler’s ultimate goal in 7 Tools for Cultivating your Child’s Potential is to help parents understand the opportunity that God has given them to “positively shape the lives and hearts of the next generation for Christ”.

7 Tools for cultivating your Child’s potential is an excellent book. It is well written and provides many good ideas on nurturing a child’s potential. It is especially recommended to all parents, but will be helpful to anyone who works with children. The author’s journey of homeschooling demonstrates the struggles parents have faced in exercising their rights to educate their children.