From Amazon typos included:
Life Skills for Young Mn is an easy way to help train up your sons to be successfuel and proficient, strong men of God. It is broken up into 18 weeks and can be counted as 1/2 a semester. It covers a variety of skills from personal grooming, how to get a job, finances, cooking, laundry, and outdoor survival skills. All of these skills will become necessary to encourage your son to live a life of purpose.

My Thoughts
Life Skills for Young Men is pretty much a short Christian based home economics course for boys.

It's targeted it at homeschooling families, but public school families could still benefit from it. Although it's not secular, it's not heavy on religion either. This was recommended by a fellow homeschooling mom. As a single parent, she is constantly on the lookout for anything to aid her in teaching her son. With a husband only home four days a month, I decided to see if we could benefit from it too. This little book has great potential if you ignore the fact that it wasn't edited.

Hands down, the best part of this book is the fact that the author already did the hard part- constructing a curriculum, complete with weekly quizzes, and a test. With a price tag of ten bucks, this book is a great deal.

After purchasing this, I looked up the author to see about her other two books and discovered that Life Skills for Young Men was originally a 12-week series on her blog. In fact, you can still get the same content for free. Nothing wrong with that, she's a clever woman. I'd much prefer to pay ten dollars for a physical book than navigate a blog and attempt to print everything out myself. My issue is that it appears she used copy and paste for everything. All the little errors sprinkled throughout the book are also on the blog. In my opinion, if you're going to publish something, especially an educational tool, you should do it properly and not half-ass it. Not only is that a terrible example to set for the children you're teaching, but it's also unprofessional. Indie writers have a hard enough time on their own. I feel like she threw this thing together in a hurry when she started getting positive comments on her blog and didn't really care about the final product. It's insulting to both the readers and fellow writers.

I'm also curious about why her husband didn't co-author this book. I think having dad explain some of this would be more effective. There's a section on showing mom respect and being tidy so she doesn't have to clean up after you. I agree, but I feel like a quick man-to-man chat would work better because it's leading by example and wouldn't come off as nagging.

Because this book has potential, I'm interested to see what her other books are like. Maybe she learned the error of her ways and will surprise me.

Much of the material in this book is common sense. I think the purpose is to help parents by showing them how to teach these life skills, not tell them what to teach. I couldn't teach my daughter how to tie her shoe, even though I've been doing it for over 30 years. Thankfully, my husband took care of it. But it made me feel like an inadequate mom. Sometimes we need guidance in order to guide our children and that's okay. This book is made me feel better about my inability to effectively teach certain things.

Amy Maryon is a homeschooling mom to ten children. After blogging about her daily life training her children, she took the posts and created several books with the material.

If you're looking for a way to get an extra half credit, then you can't beat this ten dollar deal. Included are 12 lessons, weekly quizzes, and a test at the end.

If I weren't using this as part of a curriculum, I wouldn't recommend paying more than five dollars.

I want to add that this book can be used for both sexes. After reading more books by this writer, it's clear that I don't share the same views on equality. The books for young women are extremely detailed, where she only touches on topics here.

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Created Jul 18, 2020 at 11:17am • Submit your own review...