Carol Barnier

Carol Barnier was a SMASH HIT with our convention attendees in 2009. She’s a funny, funny lady that has much to share that our attendees found to be insightful and encouraging!

God has this wonderful knack of teaching us His most valuable lessons through some of life’s most rattling moments. Several of Carol’s journeys (both painful and pleasant) are the fuel of her speaking and writing material. Through a long medical ordeal for her son, involving 13 surgical procedures before he was 3 1/2, Carol learned the powerful lesson that she wasn’t in control. When she and her husband couldn’t bring themselves to medicate this ADHD child, particularly after his already long medical history, Carol found herself homeschooling. That will grow you & rattle you simultaneously!

When Carol first began homeschooling her ADHD son, she searched everywhere for tips on HOW to teach this highly distractible child. She found volumes of information on how to recognize the ADHD child, how to manage the ADHD child, how to medicate them, how to discipline them, and how to accept them. But she found practically nothing on how to teach ADHD/ADD children math or reading on Monday morning.

Carol quickly learned that all of the traditional methods that she knew and cherished from her own childhood were a recipe for disaster with this very different child. So through much experimentation, coupled with a belief that this child’s energy was a gift from God, she developed strategies and teaching methods that worked with his need for constant motion.

The knowledge gained from this experience eventually led to her first book entitled, How To Get Your Child Off the Refrigerator and On To Learning (Emerald Books – YWAM). She has also written If I’m Diapering a Watermelon, then Where’d I leave the Baby? and The Big WHAT NOW Book of Learning Styles.

Life continues to provide many opportunities to look for God’s plan and God’s gifts in situations that others regarded as “mistakes, defects, things to be changed”. This effort to try to see each child and each event through God’s spectacles has led Carol to develop workshops on Empowering the Shy Child, or finding the gift that exists in being a highly distractible mom. Carol delights in opening ALL the gifts God has sent into her life, even the most challenging, for she has come to delight in seeing how His plan often runs delightfully counter to the world’s plans.

Carol is now a regular speaker at women’s groups, state home schooling conferences, and is a popular guest on radio programs such as Moody Radio (311 affiliates), American Family Radio (200 stations), Life Talk Radio (15 markets) and many other individual stations.