Using Your Values
to Raise Your Child
to Be an Adult You Admire

We have seen a great deal in the press during the ’90s about values. There have been countless articles in newspapers and magazines bemoaning the death of family values in particular. Numerous books have been written to correct this situation. Such books have offered prescriptions on what values should direct family life, and how to encourage or inculcate these values through family, church, and school activities.

Harriet Heath offers you a radically different approach to the subject of values and family life. As an experienced and thoughtful parent educator, she long ago realized that parents need a personal foundation upon which to base their parenting decisions and practices. Without this conscious, solid foundation, their efforts are haphazard at best and destructive at worst.

Using Your Values . . . offers you three steps to realize your dreams for your children by showing you how to—

1. Identify your own values
2. Deal with conflicting values (one’s own, a partner’s, or society’s)
3. Base all parenting decisions on your own values.

By following the three steps above, you will be able to—

• influence your children in ways you see as important
• eliminate failure and frustration in guiding and disciplining children by taking into consideration temperament, learning style, development, and basic needs
• provide your children with the values you believe will enable them to lead a productive life in a future you cannot completely foresee.

Dr. Heath is a developmental psychologist, parent educator, certified school psychologist, international educator, and founder and director of the Parent Center at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

You can hear more of the author’s philosophy on “Our Values Can (and Do) Guide Our Parenting,” an audiotape of a Dr. Heath presentation available to Missouri residents from the University of Missouri, (800) 552-8522), http://extension.missouri.edu/PARENTLINK/Library/parenting.htm.