Mark Matlock
Youth Specialties, 2010, 176 pp., $12.99, YouthSpecialties.com

Maybe you’ve been there: Teenager acts out, parent reacts, teenager pushes further away and parent ends up in your office giving you one hour to provide solutions to their years of misguided parenting. If you haven’t been there as a youth worker, you will be soon. How should we handle these situations? What can we do to help families from reaching their breaking point? Take a deep breath; help has arrived.

Planet Wisdom tycoon Mark Matlock serves up a fresh and timely resource to help parents capture their family’s place in God’s larger reality and storyline. Real World Parents weaves together a powerful combination of theology, cultural awareness, psychology and practical insight.

If you are looking for a fix-my-kid parenting book that pounds you a how-to, look elsewhere. Designed with digestible chapters and application questions, this title allows readers the freedom to apply general ideas to each family’s unique situation. The author advocates a coaching/modeling role for parents as they guide their children in decision making, creating values and discerning appropriate media choices. Great for parents in any stage and adaptable to be an individual read or a group study, Real World Parents is helpful and stands out for all the right reasons.

Matlock’s greatest contribution comes later in the book in a chapter focused on failure. “Most of us miss the opportunity to fail well,” he writes. “Instead of stopping long enough to reinforce our faith in God—not ourselves—in a visible way, we as parents, especially, instinctively rush in to minimize the impact of the failure we fear so acutely.” By exposing this fear and redefining failure, Real World Parents encourages us to help kids benefit from their failure—a powerful truth in a success-driven world.

Give it a read! The results of these ideas put into practice could drastically improve families and your ministry to them. Order your copy and a bunch more today!