I don’t know about you, but I find that my children are very unlike me in many ways.  As a result, I often cannot comprehend the way they think.  In fact, “What was she thinking?!” often runs through my mind!

This can make parenting tricky.  For us homeschoolers, it can really make us butt heads with our children as we seek to impart information to them that they seem to refuse to take in.  The problem is usually not that they’re unwilling, but that we’re speaking two different “languages.”  The Parent’s Playbook seeks to correct that.

A free quiz on the Kidzmet site analyzes your child’s personality type and learning style.  Even this free report is quite helpful.  Oddly enough, I found that the description it produced of Ariel was not close, but the recommendations were all spot-on.

The Parent’s Playbook takes this information and expands on it, in a printed manual tailored especially to your child.  Sections about your child’s personality profile, getting organized, approaching new concepts, note taking and “filing” knowledge, homework and test prep, group learning, enrichment activities, motivation and underachievement, handling successes and failures, and effective teacher communication show you how your child approaches each area and ways that you can help him succeed.  This is sometimes as specific as which words will best resonate with him and which will turn him off to a subject.  The only downside I’ve seen yet is that the pages don’t turn smoothly in the binder rings, which gets rather annoying. [UPDATE: The creator found the rings to be a problem, as well, so future Playbooks should have larger rings.]

You can use it with children as young as preschool or kindergarten, but it’s a little tricky to get an accurate assessment of these youngest ones.  In my experience, it’s more accurate the older and more self-aware your child is.

The Parent’s Playbook also comes with a CD of forms/templates to print.  I think that these are the same for everyone.  (That is, I don’t think these are personalized; I think they’re simply an auxiliary tool to use with the information from the Playbook.)  It also comes with a book of 101 Learning Activities to Stretch & Strengthen Your Child’s Multiple Intelligences.  It contains activities to strengthen children’s “Body Smarts,” “Music Smarts,” “Nature Smarts,” “Number Smarts,” “People Smarts,” “Picture Smarts,” “Self Smarts,” and “Word Smarts.”  Some of these will, of course, appeal more strongly to certain students, depending on which intelligences are innately their strongest.

This should help you avoid many of those midday stare-downs and breakdowns, as you understand where your child is coming from and how he’s processing (or not processing!) the information.

If you’re not interested in personalization, or are just curious about the other types of learners, you can now purchase them for Kindle.

Disclosure: We were provided with a playbook for my oldest daughter at no cost, to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.