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building your mate’s self-esteem

I started reading this book a few years ago and didn’t get very far, but that was not by any fault of the book.

Building Your Mate’s Self-Esteem is written by Dennis and Barbara Rainey, authors of a slew of marriage and family books, none of which come to mind at this moment. It seems like I’ve read something by them before, but it must not have been very memorable.

I set out reading this book hoping it could teach me ways that I can be a more encouraging and supportive husband, and it didn’t disappoint. There is ALOT of information in this book, and I have pages of notes to back up that statement. The book covers alot of ground, from dealing with failure to addressing parental ineptitude.

One thing that was surprising however was how much I learned about being a parent and my role in shaping my son’s self image. One statement that really stood out to me:

Children rarely question their parent’s expectations. Instead they question their personal inadequacy.

I’m not a huge fan of the Rainey’s writing style. Each segment starts with a story that tries to relate to the point of the segment. Sometimes it’s a direct example from their lives, which is great. Other times, it seems like they just googled a key word, like “perseverance” and took the first story that came up. It’s like, Ok it’s neat that the marathon runner finished the race, but did you need to take 3 pages to tell me that in order to relate it to persevering in my marriage?

So that got pretty tiring, and I found myself hunting through each segment to find the actual point. Not a good sign.

A CliffsNotes version of this book would be nice. If one is published, I’ll recommend that.

Tags: dennis rainey, marriage, review, self image

Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 5:21 pmand is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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