Book Review: Capable
Sissy Goff and David Thomas, Capable: How to Teach Your Kids the Strengths, Skills, and Strategies to Build Resilience. Bethany House Publishers, 2026. 296 pp.
Modern parenting books can be depressing reads. In book after book, authors cite frightening statistics, screen time warnings, and rising mental health issues. Parents can feel overwhelmed, even useless, by everything they’re expected to manage in their children’s lives as they help their children grow into independent, well-functioning adults. Worse, these books often contradict one another, offering competing advice about how to read the data and act on it. Add guides that rub against Christian values and competing visions of how to raise a child toward Jesus, and the confusion only deepens.
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But after reading Capable: How to Teach Your Kids the Strengths, Skills, and Strategies to Build Resilience, I felt hopeful—dare I say capable!—of leading my children through the challenges ahead. Sissy Goff and David Thomas argue that kids are struggling because they rarely get the chance to struggle. Children need challenge to become capable, and the book offers practical strategies for building resilience through opposition.
We Are Equipped as Parents
Other people’s opinions abound in our social-media-saturated world. I found Capable a helpful reminder that I already have the skills I need to parent well. I don’t need to Google answers or find a reel to help me respond to my child. As a recovering people pleaser who deeply desires to do the right and best thing for my children, I needed that reminder. God has equipped us for our callings as parents and for our individual callings to serve Him (Proverbs 22:6; Ephesians 2:10; 1 Peter 4:10). Reflecting on my own childhood, I’m thankful my parents made me do hard things despite my anxiety and craving for comfort. For example, they made me learn to drive a manual transmission while all my friends happily learned on automatics. It wasn’t easy or fun at first, but through the frustration, I did it.
Capable has inspired me to seek challenging new experiences for my children.
My daughter is sensitive, fearful, and full of big emotions. I found many strategies to be practically helpful, especially for teaching children coping skills and setting boundaries around emotional reactions. We have also incorporated Thomas’s concept of “the kick.” Borrowed from distance running, it describes the spike of energy a runner summons at the end of a race to finish well. Thomas applies it to life as a way to push through challenges. Because my daughter and I had read the workbook together, I used this language during a difficult family hike. We both talked about “finding” our kick to reach the next stretch of trail until we made it to the end. As we keep using the term to remind ourselves of our capability, I expect it to carry into other activities she feels she can’t finish.
Supporting Emotions, Setting Boundaries
I have a confession: like many Millennial parents, I have been influenced by social media and the pressure to be a “gentle” parent. I also struggle to discipline my children. Methods of previous generations—like yelling or spanking—feel foreign to me. I don’t want to resemble the harsh moms I saw in movies growing up, nor do I want my children to see me as nothing but the fun police. Instagram parents who calmly reason with their kids and help them sort through their “big feelings” can make “because I said so” feel inadequate. But you don’t have to spend much time in the real world to see that much so-called gentle parenting ends with the kids running the show.
I want to validate my children’s emotions without becoming a pushover who caters to every whim. Here, Goff and Thomas’s counsel on supporting emotions while setting boundaries was practical for me. Since reading this book, I feel more empowered to set boundaries for my kids, especially around their emotional reactions.
I found their questions for both kids and parents thought-provoking. As a spiritual director, I always appreciate a good question. This book would work well for a discussion group. I plan to read it again with my husband and work through some questions together so we can consider how our parents encouraged our own capability.
Parenting Boys and Girls
Both authors have written previous books: Goff on parenting girls (Raising Worry-Free Girlsand Raising Girls) and Thomas on parenting boys (Raising Emotionally Strong Boys and Wild Things). Throughout Capable, they address differences between parenting girls and boys. For example, girls can often list their weaknesses but struggle to name their strengths, while boys can often list their strengths more readily. I had not realized I was not alone in struggling to name my strengths.
This insight helps me as a mother of both a daughter and a son, especially because my daughter struggles when I compliment my son without also complimenting her. I sometimes feel alone in helping her navigate big emotions, so I felt seen by the many examples of girls who struggle in similar ways. These sections were especially interesting because many parenting resources now avoid discussing differences between men and women. I also saw both myself and my daughter in the data, since we struggle more with anxiety than the men in our lives. The authors give specific advice to mothers: do not speak your anxieties over your children, especially your daughters.
That said, the authors focus on girls struggling with anxiety and boys struggling with anger, which feels reductionistic and unhelpful if your children don’t fit those patterns. I know men who struggle with anxiety and women who struggle with anger. The gendered patterns were interesting, and the examples were helpful, but I wish the authors had offered guidance on parenting the boy or girl who is the exception.
Capable Building Exercises
My kids loved the Capable Building Exercises (CBEs) in the workbook. The authors use CBEs to help kids practice each chapter’s Capable theme, and they give parents and children a fun way to engage together. One favorite was walking backward with a book balanced on the head. My seven-year-old enjoyed filling out the questions, though I’d say that is about the earliest age she would have felt comfortable working through them. My five-year-old son, by contrast, had no interest in answering questions and wouldn’t even draw his responses. For younger elementary-aged kids, the first chapters felt long and better suited to older children. The rest of the book focuses on the character traits behind capable strengths, skills, and strategies, and these sections are more manageable: two or three pages to discuss the theme, complete the CBEs, and answer a few reflection questions.
Capable Christians, Capable Anglicans
Both authors clearly hold their Christian faith deeply, as many of their personal stories show. But Capable offers little practical advice for the spiritual formation of children. That feels like a missed opportunity because I want my children to grow capable and resilient in their faith too. As our kids grow, they’ll increasingly find that convictions we hold dear are treated by the surrounding culture not merely as mistaken but as wrong-headed or even harmful. Sooner or later, Christian children will ask, “Why are we different?”—about how we spend Sundays, handle money, understand marriage, and define life’s purpose.
From Child to Capable Adult
So, how does one build and nurture a child to become a spiritually resilient adult?
To me, spiritual capability includes addressing or sitting with difficult questions of doubt, evil, and suffering in age-appropriate ways. It also includes scaffolding difficult faith conversations. The Capable Workbook does include practical ideas for nurturing spiritually capable kids through faithful character qualities such as humility, gratitude, and perseverance, along with accompanying Scripture references. Still, parents will need catechetical resources and apologetic tools from elsewhere to build their children’s spiritual capabilities. Personally, I recommend N.T. Wright’s God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook as a good place to start with little kids.
Likewise, nothing about Capable or the workbook felt particularly Anglican, but many catechetical practices would pair well with the Capable Building Exercises (CBEs).
A few ideas of my own:
- Scripture memory;
- encouraging a child to identify and initiate a project to serve family, neighbors, or friends;
- having them locate the page in the Book of Common Prayer being used in the service;
- letting an older child choose a Bible story and build a lesson to teach a younger sibling or cousin; age-appropriate practices of silence and solitude,
- beginning with a minute and building from there; participation in the Daily Office, scaffolded by beginning with family prayer and lengthening the Scripture and prayer time as children grow in comfort; and
- training to become an acolyte and serve in the liturgy.
These are just a few ideas. Even more appear in The Liturgical Home, and I am also very excited about the new Anglican House Family imprint from Anglican House Publishers.
Your Children Are Capable
Capable by Goff and Thomas offers a simple but transformative framework: identify three things your children can’t do independently, three things they can do with help, and then work toward full independence. Since reading it, I catch myself intervening unnecessarily. My kids have even adopted the book’s refrain: “I think you can do it because you are what?” “Capable!”
What makes this book essential is its core message: children need to struggle to build competence and character. It offers validation many of us didn’t receive, and it is immediately actionable. Whether you’re a parent questioning how much you’re doing, a teacher seeking strategies for self-reliance, or a grandparent looking for research-backed reasons to step back, this book delivers.
And yes, five-year-olds can open their own snacks, even when they insist they can’t.
Image: Capable, © 2026 Bethany House Publishers.
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