The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

204 pages

"Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?

Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you'll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo's clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list). With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house 'spark joy' (and which don't), this international best seller featuring Tokyo's newest lifestyle phenomenon will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home--and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire."
-Back Cover

I picked this book up at Costco awhile back because my husband is always trying to get us to get rid of more stuff and nagging about having a more organized house. I really liked what she had to say. Her method really does change the way you look at tidying up your home and getting rid of stuff. I loved the idea of only keeping things that spark joy and I liked that she tells you what categories to start with. I think the category idea is brilliant because it forces you to gather everything from your entire house in that category. So often I clean a room at a time and without fail I'm doing it again the next week. Her method tends to give more life to objects then I think some of us in the west are used to, but I also liked the idea of showing gratitude to our home and our belongings for what they do for us.

Having said that, I haven't completed my house purge yet. I did start with my clothes like she recommended. She says that you need to touch and handle each item and ask yourself if that item brings you joy. Doing this with my clothes, it was so easy to get rid of clothes that until then I hadn't been able to part with. I was surprised at how quickly the answer of whether or not it brought joy came. I'd been hanging on to "someday" clothes that I didn't need to hang on to. I ended up with 7 large garbage bags full of clothes to get rid of. I folded and hung the remaining clothes the way she recommended as well. It felt really good. I did break her rule of not giving discarded items to family. I let my sister go through the clothes and I think they're now bringing her joy. I took everything else to D.I.

I still need to tackle the rest of my house. Doing it all at once does, admittedly, feel a little overwhelming, but the idea of having it all done at once is also appealing. A couple of cousins were reading this book at the same time and one of them asked me what I thought about her thoughts on books. She says to only keep a few books, but she also lives in a small space. For the most part, I agreed with what she had to say about books. I'll never not have a home library--it brings me immense joy--but I am to the point where I'm only keeping books that bring me joy, books I'll read again or want to share with others.

This was a great read. I'm looking forward to continuing to tidy up our home and being done with it once and for all.

Growing Up by Brad Wilcox

132 pages

"Growing Up--Gospel Answers about Maturation and Sex presents the 'facts of life' as they should be presented--with respect and in the context of gospel standards and doctrine. Written especially for young people between the ages of ten and fifteen, this book will help open doors of communication between parents and children, facilitating their discussion of

• Conception, prenatal development, and birth
• Physical growth and maturation
• Love, marriage and sex
• The law of chastity

Growing Up offers the right information at the right time to help young people make the right choices." -Back Cover

I don't remember my parents ever really talking to me about any of this when I was growing up. I do remember that when I got engaged my mom gave me some pamphlets--written decades earlier--to read and told me to ask her if I had any questions, but by the age of 21 I wasn't used to talking to my parents about that kind of stuff and I wasn't about to start. (I let my fiancé read the pamphlets when I was done with them though!) 

My girls are growing up in a different age, an age when this kind of information (or misinformation) is available at the click of a button and basically in every primetime TV show. I've talked to them a little bit already, but I thought a well-written book on the subject might be helpful for all of us. I love Brad Wilcox. When I was a teenager I loved his EFY talks. The pleasant surprise was that the foreword is written by Dr. Myers, who just happens to have been my childhood physician and the doctor who brought my then fiancé and myself in for the marriage talk. He spoke to us in an open, direct way about sex and what I always appreciated about that talk was that it didn't make us feel uncomfortable. None of these topics should make us feel uncomfortable if discussed in the right way, which I think is the point of the book. We should be able to use anatomically correct names without giggling. 

This book will be a very helpful tool in helping my girls be informed about their bodies and their bodies' functions. It is written with an LDS perspective but I think it's helpful for any faith-based family or any other family for that matter. My oldest daughter is almost 13 and about to enter junior high. I feel like she is ready for most of this book and it's a good time to read and discuss it. There are a few chapters (About Boys, and a few of the last chapters on the more serious topics) that I'm still a little unsure about reading with her. I feel like they'll involve a little thought and prayer beforehand, and I probably won't read them until we've read everything else, but eventually she will hear about everything in this book and I would much rather she's heard it from me first and can have a correct perception of those things. 

Escaping the Endless Adolescence by Joseph Allen & Claudia Worrell Allen

231 pages

"Do you sometimes wonder how your teen is ever going to survive on his or her own as an adult? Does your high school junior seem oblivious to the challenges that lie ahead? Does your academically successful nineteen-year-old still expect you to 'just take care of' even the most basic life tasks?

Welcome to the stunted world of the Endless Adolescence. Recent studies show that today's teenagers are more anxious and stressed and less independent and motivated to grow up than ever before. Twenty-five is rapidly becoming the new fifteen for a generation suffering from a debilitating 'failure to launch.' Now two preeminent clinical psychologists tell us why and chart a groundbreaking escape route for teens and parents.

Drawing on their extensive research and practice, Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen show that most teen problems are not hardwired into teens' brains and hormones but grow instead out of a 'Nurture Paradox' in which our efforts to support our teens by shielding them from the growth-spurring rigors and rewards of the adult world have backfired badly. With compelling examples and practice and profound suggestions, the authors outline a novel approach for producing dramatic leaps forward in teen mature, including

• Turn Consumers into Contributors. Help teens experience adult maturity--its bumps and its joys--through the right kind of employment or volunteer activity.
• Feed Them with Feedback. Let teens see and hear how the larger world perceives them. Shielding them from criticism--constructive or otherwise--will only leave them unequipped to deal with it when they get to the 'real world.'
• Provide Adult Connections. Even though they'll deny it, teens desperately need to interact with adults (including parents) on a more mature level--and such interaction will help them blossom!
• Stretch the Teen Envelope. Do fewer things for teens that they can do for themselves, and give them tasks just beyond their current level of competence and comfort.

Today's teens are starved for the lost fundamentals they need to really grow: adult connections and the adult rewards of autonomy, competence, and mastery. Restoring these will help them unlearn their adolescent helplessness and grow into adults who can make you--and themselves--proud." -Dust Jacket

I thought I'd get a jump start on this since I have a soon-to-be thirteen-year-old and I would like her to be a capable adult someday. I also want to be a capable parent. I thought this book was very well written. It wasn't full of technical/scientific terms but was written for the average parent. I liked the examples it gave with different teens. Object lessons are always good for me. I found myself agreeing with so much of what was said and suggested and I learned a lot that I'm anxious to try. Some of the tidbits I took away from this were:

• Rather than just giving everything to our teens we need to ask some things of our teens. The Nurture Paradox is that we try so hard to give them everything we think will make them happy, that we don't want them to be deprived of material things like we were, that we nurture them with the wrong things. The authors suggest that doing this is like "poisoning their character just as surely as an excess of sugar and fat in their diets can poison their bodies." "Larry and Megan came from quite different neighborhoods and backgrounds. But what both of their parents shared was the unstated assumption that good parenting is reflected in what we provide our children, rather than in what we expect from them."
• "Our ultimate goal with our teens shouldn't be to get them into a good college, but rather to have them learn to be successful on their own in their future lives." (They talk a lot about the education of young people in this country and how it fails them to a large extent. Too much emphasis and stress are placed on college admissions, rather than on teaching young people how to navigate the adult world. They also give some interesting alternatives.) "Bending over backward to get one's child into a good college will not matter nearly as much as preparing them to function independently and to thrive once they are there."
• Doing work that matters to someone helps teens on their way to escaping the Endless Adolescence. They need to feel needed and doing work that makes a difference in the adult world.
• Teens need to be socialized by adults and not by their peers.
• "Freedom should be linked to behavior" and not to age requirements.
• We need to provide our teens with a support system (referred to as "scaffolding") so they can learn lessons but with support from us. 
• "Adults are the relationship maintainers with teens."
• "Adults should use the same conventions of respect and politeness when talking with teens that we use when talking to other adults." We should not speak to them condescendingly or always criticize. We should make sure that we have specific time with teens where there is no criticism given, we just talk with them.
• "Adolescents, for all their good intentions, are not adults in terms of their relationship skills." They quite often lack the conversation skills that adults have acquired and we need to be careful not to judge their behaviors based on an adult skill set.
• "Again and again, however, we pass up opportunities to allow our teens the experience of mastery, usually in the mistaken notion that we are nurturing them and showing them love by doing things for them." We need to take the time to teach them how to do things that are within their capacity and slightly challenge them.
• "The best feedback comes not from parents but from the real world." We need to remove the middleman--us. They give the example of taking our teens with us to parent-teacher conference so they can hear first-hand what needs improvement and what they're doing well.
• "Teens are built for physical activity, and with enough of it, will function better in all areas of life."
• The +/- 5 rule: sometimes our teens act 5 years old than they are...and sometimes they act 5 years younger.

There are definitely several things I can work on now that I think will make a huge difference, especially the one about speaking to our teens with the same respect and politeness that we do with other adults, and not being condescending or too critical. Sometimes I am too hard on my kids. I'm also excited to help my daughters do more for themselves. I've never been the mom who gives my kids everything they want. I make them earn money for the things that they really want. My middle daughter summed it up in my Mother's Day card this year: "You give me what I need and sometimes what I want." I think a lot of these suggestions will help my relationship with my daughters.