Reviewed by Viga Boland for Readers' Favorite

Building Better Humans by David and Lisa Davoust is the book I wish I’d had over 30 years ago when we first found out we were going to be parents. What David and Lisa Davoust have written about raising children, who will become tomorrow’s happy, productive adults, far outweighs anything I learned from Dr. Benjamin Spock way back then. Despite its somewhat robotic sounding title, Building Better Humans is written with the love, compassion and wisdom that come with years of determining what works and what doesn’t in the challenging task of being the best parent you can be. David and Lisa Davoust establish one key principle right at the beginning of Building Better Humans: “Parents’ primary role is to prepare our kids for life without us.” Such an obvious statement, but how many parents think of that when a child acts up, is disobedient, or won’t pull their weight for the betterment of the family and themselves? Most parents are too concerned that disciplining the child will make him/her unhappy and fail to follow through on what they need to do: prepare the child for future conflicts.

In an easy to read style, with colourful illustrations and anecdotes that make you smile, David and Lisa Davoust explore and explain key areas of critical importance to raising not just happy children, but confident adults: communication, punishment and discipline, and social skills. They provide guidelines for talking to your children about dating, sex and handling money. They even address the positive and negative sides of our current technology-obsessed culture. And at the end of each chapter, they sum up their ideas in quick reference point form. As you turn the pages of Building Better Humans, you realize that so much of what David and Lisa Davoust have written is just plain common sense that we rarely take time to think through and which no schools ever teach, but should. Thank heavens David and Lisa wrote this book. Don’t raise your children without it!