Friday, June 29, 2012

Book Review: Parents' Guide to a Christian College

Author: Todd Ream, Timothy Herrmann, Skip Trudeau
Title: A Parent’s Guide to the Christian College: Supporting Your Child’s Mind and Spirit During the College Years
Description:  The book was written by three Christian college administrators as a guide for parents who are making the decision, or have decided, to send their children to a Christian college.
Source: I think I got it at Preview Days at Southeastern. Something like that…
Writing style: Each chapter takes a movie that is set at college, or with college-aged young people, and uses themes and ideas from that movie to present issues that parents or students will probably encounter at college. The authors make the effort to distinguish how each issue is handled at a Christian college from how it might be handled (or ignored) in a secular higher education setting.
Audience: Christian parents of teens and young adults.
Major ideas: Christian colleges are the best preparation young people can have for life. Parents need to be transitioning from their daily involvement with their children to a less-intrusive presence in order to avoid being called helicopter parents.
Wrap-up: I’m sold on Christian higher education and lucky to be a part of it, so this book was preaching to the choir. I have a son starting college in August, so I was interested to see what advice the book gives to parents. It turns out to be mostly: “Don’t try to solve their problems for them.” I probably needed that reinforcement. Other than that, though, the book didn’t leave much of an impression. 2/5*

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