Here’s a book to give dads a boost of confidence that they can be an awesome dad. It’s called The Good Dad Guide: 7 Things That Matter Most to Your Kids. The cover of this book made me smile every time I looked at it. The book was published in 2016 and was written by Charles Marshall—a motivational speaker, comedian, and author. One of the sentences on the back sums it up well: “With intriguing insights, biblically based wisdom, and stories from his life and the lives of others, he explores seven key attributes of awesome dads . . .” The author makes it clear that your kids should be a priority. He seems to possess an incredible amount of common sense that is often missing in our world today.

The material in the book is broken down into very small chapters that could fit into any man’s schedule. There are seven main divisions, covering seven things that good dads do—provide, participate, prepare, protect, promote, prevent, persist. It seems to be a carefully structured book. There are seven divisions and seven chapters in each division, and the title of each division begins with a “p.”

The author reveals his enthusiasm for fatherhood in the first sentence of the introduction when he says: “Becoming a dad is the best and most exciting thing that can happen to a man.” Each chapter is mainly a story from his life or someone else’s that he cleverly uses to illustrate the point of the chapter. Subtle humor pops up here and there. The end of each chapter has a “takeaway.” The first chapter has an amazing story about the man who stepped in to be a father to him and his four siblings after his real father left his family. The second chapter is a great story of the author’s “Huck Finn adventure” in his childhood.

At first, I was thinking that a dad could just plow through the book in 49 days, reading a chapter a day, like he would read a devotional. Then I realized the book could probably have a lot greater impact on a dad’s life if he read one chapter a week and tried to meditate on applying it for a week. There are 52 weeks in a year and 49 chapters in this book. A dad could spend close to a year using this book to hone his fatherhood skills, if he chose to. This book doesn’t deal with issues of the teen years, but I’m convinced that it would be a valuable gift for any man who is about to be a dad or who is already a dad with young children.