What makes me qualified to offer advice on how to raise a hard-working, self-motivated, well-adjusted child?  I certainly believe that everything starts with our parents.  Parents have the first and most powerful impact on their children.  Peers play a role as well but much later than parents.  I’m no different.  My early influences came from my parents.  My father was a decorated WWII veteran and a hard-working farmer.  As part of the Greatest Generation, he had a profound influence on my values and beliefs. I was educated in a rural school in northwestern Ohio, where it was rare for a farm boy to go to college but I knew from a very young age that I would go because that is what my parents expected me to do.  In 1965 I became the only male in my high school class of 29 to go to college and the first of my family as well.  In 1970 I received a BS in Business Administration from The Ohio State University. In 1974 I was the first to graduate from OSU Dental School with a Business Degree.  After 2 years in the Air Force Dental Corp and 5 years in private practice I left dentistry to pursue business interests that allowed me to spend more time with my children and their various sports.  Over the years I’ve had many ventures in various industries including raising venture capital for private gas & oil exploration, construction, real estate investment, bar and restaurants, sports agent for Major League Baseball, elite baseball tournaments and the snack food business.  In 1988 I founded FUNacho, a product and service specializing in nacho chips and cheese.  I started FUNacho locally in Cincinnati, OH, expanded regionally in 1990 and went national in 1991.  For 3 consecutive years in 1993, 1994 & 1995 FUNacho was named to the Inc. 500 as one of the fastest growing privately held businesses in the United States.  In addition to this varied career, over the past 45 years my passion has been youth baseball.  In 1983 I built a 3-field baseball complex and organized the first select baseball program in our northern Cincinnati community.  In 1994, I founded the Cincy Flames, a select baseball organization that grew and resulted in over 30 former players who were drafted into professional baseball, including 5 first round draft picks, and over 300 players who have advanced on to play college baseball.  Of my 5 children, my 4 sons all went to college to play division one baseball, one went on to play professionally and my daughter pursued her passion and earned a design degree.  What shaped me?  What shaped my children?  What influences in someone’s life will lead to their successes and failures?  You can weigh many contributing factors, but it will almost always come back to parenting.   I’ve heard it said many times that “there’s no blueprint for raising kids.”  Well, I would like to attempt to change that.  In my 32 years of on-field coaching youth baseball, I have seen a lot of what parents do wrong.  My hope for this book is to make you look hard at your own actions and reactions when dealing with not only your child’s athletic experiences, but also their other successes and failures as they mature. How you handle their ups and downs can and will have a profound effect on their development into adulthood.  I have seen many well-meaning parents make some very poor life-altering decisions.  Most of this book is written with baseball as the focal point because that is what I know best but the principles can be applied to all aspects of your child’s life.  All of us want the same thing for our children.  We want them to be happy, well adjusted, productive adults.  Baseball and sports in general can be one of the greatest building blocks that you can offer your children to help achieve this goal if YOU do it right. You can also damage your child’s chances for success in a career and in future relationships if you do it wrong. It may sound extreme, but parenting is powerful and how you handle guiding your child’s development can and will determine his future successes and failures as an adult.