Leanna Rae Scott Author Bio

Leanna was not a typical six-year old, even for the fifties. She was a very responsible and capable one. She made chocolate cakes from scratch and from memory; she made oatmeal porridge for herself and two older siblings, getting everyone off to school every morning; and she saved her babysitting earnings and $1 weekly allowances in a bank account, withdrawing funds for special purchases such as a $21 seventeen-jewel watch when she was seven.

Leanna, always and ever  the compliant one, continued tending her cousin—and his three siblings as they came along—receiving the mother/aunt-agreed-upon 25 cents per occasion. (This was much less than the going rate. It was a second-generation payback expectation placed on Leanna only because her aunt had often babysat her and her siblings for free.) By the age of ten, Leanna had an extensive babysitting clientele within a thirty-mile radius, which kept her very busy earning 35 cents per hour. She also babysat full-time for weeks out of her summers at the rate of $3 per day, including for her aunt. Except for food, shelter, and other such costs, Leanna was proud to be financially independent and highly self-managed by the age of ten. On weekends she regularly took half-hour bus rides into the city for shopping, movies with friends, and obtaining her latest armload of fiction from the library.

Looking back, Leanna has never felt that she missed out on childhood due to her early entry into the entrepreneurial world. As a child, she typically was impatient to be one year older than she actually was (until the age of 22). She was always very achievement- and learning-oriented, for the sheer satisfaction of achievement and learning. By the age of five, from closely observing her older siblings practice their reading, she learned to sight-read all of the first-grade readers before starting school. As an eight-year old she could knit socks and mitts. At ten she was purchasing fabric and creating much of her own wardrobe. Also at ten she taught herself from a textbook how to properly type, and then used her new-found typing skills for school assignments, improving her already good grades.

Leanna was always an inquisitive child. At three she constantly asked, "Why?" She was the young child who found adult conversations interesting to sit in on. Of course, the adults attempted to whisper the "adult" things, but she made every effort to hear and understand them. Leanna was an early developer , at her full adult height by ten-and-a-half. She was the eager mid-teen who daydreamed of having eight children of her own. She was the self-directed, skilled, satisfied, no-regrets accelerated child.

Leanna has not just been an entrepreneur. In her mid-teen and young adult years she was employed in the manufacturing of carpeting, plywood, and holiday trailers, and as a jewelry store clerk and hospital kitchen worker. During the first fifteen years of her parenting career she mostly was a stay-at-home mom, but she also helped her first husband operate a number of small businesses (including turkey farming, custom farming, auto sales, a service station, and doing forest cut-line cleanup with a chain saw). Also during this time Leanna managed a number of her own endeavors, including selling hand-knitted items, selling Tupperware for a number of years, doing wedding apparel alterations, modeling as an amateur, learning small-business accounting for family businesses, learning to grow and preserve many foods, and learning to develop and print her own black and white photos.

For four years Leanna and her husband and their family of nine, then ten children performed professionally as a country music band. They entertained crowds at fairs, dances, and other community events. They also hosted a highly acclaimed music and entertainment Jamboree over a long weekend in 1985. Leanna single-handedly planned and organized the entire event in just eight weeks. In and around this period of time in her life Leanna did some work for an income tax firm and a grocery store, and as a magazine editor. She also started her long-time business of teaching accounting to small-business owners. Leanna took formal modeling training as well. She made two telethon guest appearance and her family was the subject of a televised documentary and a news highlight.

After the first year of her second marriage and just after the birth of her eleventh child, Leanna started to work part-time on her bachelor's degree through a distance university. After her thirteenth child she started working as close to full time as possible on her university courses. With numerous interruptions it took her fifteen years from the first course until the last to complete, with distinction, a Bachelor of Arts degree with double majors in psychology and women's studies.

Some of those interruptions included: earning a Counseling Women Certificate; taking Crisis Telephone Line and Suicide Prevention training; completing a full-time six-month entrepreneurial program; foster parenting four of her grandchildren for sixteen months (while also taking foster-parent training); working as a relief crisis counselor at a women's shelter for a year and a half; obtaining and maintaining social worker status; managing a two-mall Hickory Farms operation for one Christmas season; doing respite in-home and then residential treatment care for mentally challenged adults and adolescents; working at a hotel front desk; making two long-distance moves, including selling and buying homes; working as a case manager and federal biller at a counseling agency; doing contract writing and copy editing; working part-time for an airline for three of those years; and most importantly, single parenting her minor children (who numbered between seven and four during that time period)—not to mention spending as much time interacting with her adult children and their spouses and her ever-increasing number of grandchildren whenever possible (including organizing reunions and other gatherings).

Back in 1977 when Leanna discovered the secret to eliminating temper tantrums, it was not a stretch for her to think of sharing her knowledge with other parents in general. It was not her first ever urge to write a book, she claims, but it was likely her first clear plan for a topic.Leanna vividly recalls an

incident when she was seven or eight years old where she was carefully strolling on her back lawn along with a friend—carefully, she says, because the back lawn was where her grandfather's chickens (and honeybees) were free to range. Leanna was deep into a conversation with her friend about Ann Landers' advice column, about which Leanna declared, with conviction, "I could do better than that!"

Leanna believes she must have sensed, even at that young age, that she had a real potential for wisdom. She also believes that throughout her life she's made a consistent effort to gain as much of that commodity as possible. She says she has consciously applied her ingrained analytic nature in trying to learn from her own mistakes and from those of others. By the age of six, she had promised herself three things: 1) that she would never smoke cigarettes; 2) that she would never divorce and subject her own children to being raised without their father; and  3) that she would somehow see to it that there would  be love and emotional connection in her own family when the time came. As it turned out, Leanna's late-onset wisdom overruled her six-year-old vow to never divorce—her first three husbands all proved to be detrimental to Leanna and her children.

In 1977 Leanna just knew there had to be thousands (perhaps millions) of parents like her that hadn't yet found the total temper tantrum solution from parenting books or through their own experience. She was certaom that she had very valuable information to offer, but she wasn't yet ready to write the book back then. She first wanted to get more education, not only to gain credibility (stay-at-home moms don't often get much of that) but also to improve her ability to articulate her message. Since finishing her degree in 2004 (finally!), along with her airline job, Leanna has worked in a number of other capacities: filing at a university's HR department; as an activities specialist for a women's shelter, as an advocate at a teen mom shelter, and as a waitress. In 2005 Leanna finished working on two out of four of a series of revelatory and humorous online pre-dating questionnaires (that are yet to be marketed, but that she credits with helping her in 2008 find a man she is exceptionally compatible with). In 2007, Leanna moved herself and her remaining two children to a new household, and since then has worked on a number of new self-employed ventures. While working part-time at her airline job, plus sequentially operating courier, cleaning, editing, and online content-writing (SEO) businesses, Leanna has been able to write her first book, reasearch and learn how to self-publish, become her own publisher, and worked on her own website and Search Engine Optimization.

Leanna's first book in her future series is called, MegaMom’s Wisdom for Tantrums: The Tantrum Book to End All Tantrums (The Secret to Total Prevention and Total Elimination of Temper Tantrums: Infant Anger Management). Leanna is finally embarking on her long-awaited, hopefully extensive writing and publishing career. She is at an age where most people try to slow down and retire. Although Leanna will be retiring from her airline job in 2011, regarding self-employment, she still feels the same as she did years ago during an assignment for a personal finance course in which she said, "I refuse to end my productive days until my body or mind forces me to." Her ultimate dream is to still be writing books into her 90s. Leanna has, however, high hopes of doing a fair bit of her future writing from numerous tropical locations and while on various road trips with her travel-companion, partners-in-dual-businesses husband. Since marrying in 2009, Leanna and Ira have been helping each other build their respective entrepreneurial dreams.