mario reyes
papi picasso
Building Young Kings. Building Families. Building Legacies.
Parents and sons agree that the Kingdom Son Healing Workshops have enriched several areas of their lives—both personal and relational—with tools to start the difficult conversations and realizing the power of family. Father-and-son duos that participated in the Kingdom Son Healing Workshops met for eight Sundays at The Gathering Spot, located in the heart of Atlanta.
Kingdom Son was founded with the intention of creating a “sense of royalty in our sons that can reinforce their self-esteem to weather life’s storms until they become accomplished enough to rely on their own strengths.” He based the workshop topics off of his debut book, “A Son with No Father is A Book with No Author,” which is a collection of short-stories, poems, self-help essays and conversations between Reyes and his son, Mario Jr., for parents to use as a sounding board, a source of constructive criticism and teachable moments to engage and empower their children.
In shaping the curriculum for both the workbook and workshops, Reyes gleaned insight from experts including the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, the Pew Research Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. He coupled this formal research by intimately sharing personal experiences. Weekly workshop topics included youth, love, family, school, bullying, race, sexuality and manhood.
A SON WITH NO FATHER WORKBOOK
In hopes of facilitating communication between parent and child, I decided to create a workbook that can aide in that dialogue. If you choose to read this book together the below matrix uses age and the growth chart to help you consider your unique child’s needs in navigating the topics.
The associated chart is based loosely on Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and speech/language milestones. They are often the gross framework from which newer theories have been based.
Using this as a baseline for navigating the book you can chart the growth and development of your conversations with your child. Although this chart suggests age no one knows your child better than you, therefore you may feel comfortable discussing more mature and advanced topics.
The Choice Is Yours!
“As a single mom, Mario starting that conversation with Taj lifted a huge burden off of my shoulders. In Kingdom Son, Taj learned about more than what’s simply taught in sex-ed. They touched on some aspects that as a mom I probably wouldn't even have thought to mention. When you've got people like Mario, they set the bar for what parenting looks like.”
ALEXIS SETON