JUSTIFICATION FOR OUR ESTIMATES
ABOUT INCREASED EARNING POTENTIAL
FOR KIDS WHOSE FAMILIES USE THE TOOL KITS

Consider this quote from a news magazine called The Week, 9/5/03.

Don't expect schools to "fix" the legions of poor kids who are flunking their lessons, said William Raspberry in The Washington Post.

Today, every urban school district in America is facing enormous pressure to raise the academic achievement of kids from impoverished families. But the hard truth is that schools just can't make up for what children's parents fail to provide—and an exhaustive study proves it.

Researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent countless hours with both middle-class and poor families, carefully observing the interactions between parents and kids. They found that the most important predictor of academic success is how much verbal stimulation parents provide early in a child's life. A child whose parents talk to him often, using large, varied vocabularies, almost always does far better in school than a child whose parents themselves are inarticulate. And in professional and working-class homes, parents speak directly to their children more than twice as often. the difference between the amount of stimulation that poor and middle-class kids receive, the researchers concluded, "is so huge as to be essentially unbridgeable."

So educators and politicians can speak all they like about raising test scores and leaving no child behind. Until the nation's underclass learns what it is doing wrong, our society's best-intentioned efforts are doomed to failure.

No one would doubt that academic success is correlated to job success. Therefore, use of our Family Success Tool Kits will help kids get better jobs in the future by guiding their families into varied conversations about a lot of things.

If, later, because of using these Tool Kits, one of a family's children is one job promotion ahead of where he or she would be at age 20 (it could start earlier), assuming working until age 65, – that is 45 years of making more money. If it starts out as $500 more per year at age 20 and finishes up at $1,000 more a year at retirement age, that is probably around $35,000 for the small expense for the Family Success Tool Kits. However, it is much more likely that by age 35, increased earnings would be $1,200 a year. So, for your purchase and effort, that child would bring in over $50,000 more over a working lifetime.

However, that's just if you give the increased communication skills of the Great Family Conversations Tool Kit. If you add the responsibility skills that would be learned using the Great Parenting Conversations Tool Kit, add a supervisor's salary increase of $1,000 a month from age 35 on, and that leaves $12,000 a year increase for 30 years, or $360,000 extra income, not counting the extra income that would have been coming in for 15 years between age 20 and 35. For just one child! What if you have 3? Over a million extra dollars for your family!

And, if you add the thinking and problem-solving skills of the Great Family Leadership Tool Kit, expect management-level jobs to be a possibility and push the extra earnings up to $250,000 or more per child. All this for only $45 for all 3 Tool Kits!

And, this is not to mention the most valuable gain from these extra "people" and problem-solving skills: Better relationships. Better friendships. Better marriages. Better relationships with their own children when they grow up.

Special Skills for More Success in Relationships and Jobs

likely benefits of each of the Family Tool Kits

FAMILY CONVERSATIONS TOOL KIT: beginning safety in family communication, dialogue skills, ability to express self, listening skills, tolerance for differences, appreciation of uniqueness, feeling of importance and significance, appropriate attention from others, etc.

PARENTING CONVERSATIONS TOOL KIT: cooperation between parents, intentional parenting skills, thoughtful consideration of life's important things, responsible thinking skills, task planning skills, chore recognition and analysis, participation in discipline and correction, better chore and rule compliance, maturity skills, acceptance of strengths and weaknesses, growth in areas of weakness, life success orientation, many skills to foster personal success, survival knowledge, etc.

FAMILY LEADERSHIP TOOL KIT: family cooperation, appreciation, affirmation skills, system for rewarding good behavior and family contributions, positive attitudes, "can do" orientation to life, wisdom for successful living, values for success, creative problem-solving skills, solution-thinking about social situations, ideas for family night times, family teamwork, etc.

Read these statements from a noted person speaking about career success:

"The best minds are constantly asking questions and acquiring information. In the legal profession this is the first task, getting the facts. It seems to be the first task in the medical profession as well, as it is in science and many other fields. The best candidates for jobs are thus those asking questions."

"If you are heading into an interview for a job or for any admission or any benefit that you want, the questions will decide your success at least as much as your answers."

"Always practice for those interviews that will make or unmake your career by developing the questioning skills you will need to make those interviews come alive. Not only will you arrive prepared for the moment you are judged qualified or not for employment, but you will also develop a skill critical to leadership of any organization."

"Ask questions. In every conversation and with every sort of person. And listen carefully to the answers. This practice will set you apart from a vast mass of people too absorbed in themselves to notice the world around them."

Hugh Hewitt

host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, a nationally syndicated radio talk show
professor of law at Chapman University School of Law
graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School
served five years in the Reagan Administration in a variety of posts

Hewitt's Web site is www.HughHewitt.com