Healthy Parenting: An Empowering Guide for Adult Children

This book is the most helpful parenting book I have ever read! It speaks to the unique issues of ACOAs while being applicable to parenting situations of all sorts. It really gave me a sense of what I have to be responsible for if I want to be a successful parent. The message given by this book is that the time for feeling sorry for oneself and for excuses is over, and that it is time to make things better with one's own children. The practical advice and examples gives the reader something to use to meet this end. I think that this book would be helpful to all parents - not just ACOAs.

This is a great book for people who have grown up in troubled families. It offers great advice and great insights on topics such as setting limits, boundaries, and a host of other parental problems. I use it with all of my clients and in my workshops and parent groups. Nicely written book

The thing that I loved the most about this book was the way it clearly defined the fine lines between "Healthy and Unhealthy Parenting". I learned that many of the ways in which I had been treated as a child were unfair, although I did not know it then. My mother had no right to throw her adult temper tantrums around me, emotionally pounding me for the choices that she made in her life. At the time, I accepted full blame for her misery, and because of her hot and cold mood swings, learned at an early age what it felt like to be confused and depressed. My sister and I tiptoed around our mother, wondering if she was in a good mood, or in a bad one. If bad, we knew to avoid her and stay out of her way. We learned early on to live underneath a shroud of denial, about our alcholic father and our verbally abusive grandmother, who we lived with. Our mother would badmouth them to us, revealing innappropriate secrets so she could let off steam, then expected us to supress our own feelings. We were never allowed to vent or acknowledge that we were unhappy about our invisible father and overbearing grandmother. My mother enjoyed using subtle psychological abuse. It left no physical scars, but was just as damaging. You were more likely to blame yourself than admit your mother caused your pain. Because my mother was not a big physical abuser, only having spanked us on rare occasions, we thought we had it pretty good, and had no right to complain. As a young adult in my early twenties I became stepmother to a daughter who was diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder, a difficult behavior problem which requires much tolerance and understanding on the part of the parent. Needless to say, I had trouble. I wasn't sure about what I had a right to expect and what I didn't have a right to expect from this child. We had endless power struggles because she had her own head problems brought on by her drug addict mother who abandoned her, and kept showing back up only to keep disappearing out of her life. When I read this book, it made me only too aware that I was falling into the sinkholes of my past, in ways being much like my mother. I realized to my horror that I subconsciously set my daughter up at times to fail, so I could enjoy berating her. I never would have known had I not read the book. The book showed me in undeniable ways what was acceptable and what was unacceptable forms of parenting. In every chapter I found something I could apply to my past. What a great relief it is to find out that all along, you didn't do anything wrong, after all. You can finally dump that huge weight of guilt, because it never belonged to you to begin with. And furthermore, nobody had a right to lay it all on you. How free, and light you feel after reading it. My stepdaughter is not guilt free, it would have taken a strong individual to deal with what I coped with, but I wish I had this book from the beginning