This book helps teachers, principals, superintendents, and all educators develop a repertoire of tools and skills for comfortable and effective interaction with parents. It shows you how to deal with the parent who is bossy, volatile, argumentative, aggressive, or maybe the worst - apathetic. It provides specific phrases to use with parents to help you avoid using "trigger" words which unintentionally make matters worse. It will show you how to deliver bad news to good parents, how to build positive credibility to all types of parents, and how to foster the kind of parent involvement which leads to student success.

We are used to having our parents help us, but how do we handle it when the tables are turned and our parents are the ones who need help? Declining health, financial needs, divorce, relational issues—what’s an adult child’s role when their parents are struggling? Counselor Jim Newheiser understands the many types of challenges adults may face ...

This new supplement to the bestselling Dealing with Difficult Parents, 2nd Edition is designed to help you with the specific challenges you face as a school leader when dealing with parents. The main book, Dealing with Difficult Parents, 2nd Edition, shows how your teachers and other educators can communicate with parents more effectively. With this new supplement, you’ll learn how you, as a leader, can--and must--support and coach teachers along the way. Topics covered include how to... Make sure your teachers understand the families they’re dealing with; Help your teachers communicate effectively with parents by being positive and proactive, so problems don’t escalate to the main office; Establish expectations for dealing with parents, so teachers understand how to be appropriate even when a parent is not; Ensure your teachers feel supported by you when they’re dealing with difficult parents; and Help teachers become more confident and empowered in challenging situations. With these practical books, you’ll be able to get parents on your side so they can become a positive force in your school’s success.

Numerous books have been written for adults who grew up coping with troubled and difficult parents. Often the adults who read these books say, I wish someone had told me that when I was a kid; it might have helped me so much. Unfortunately, not much has been written for the kids who are coping in the present with difficult or troubled parents. This book is written out of the belief that intelligent kids can use sound ideas to improve their lives, either on their own or with the help of healthy adults. It will offer help in sorting out whether a difficult situation may be a result of a parent’s problems. In this new third edition, changes have been made throughout in order to update and refine the author’s ideas. Two new chapters have been added, as well. The first new chapter addresses parents who tell lies. Dishonest parents are motivated in several different ways, but all dishonest parents pose special problems for their children. The second chapter discusses the idea that all parents have problems some of the time. In this chapter, the author helps young people look at the challenges posed by recognizing that all parents, even excellent ones, have shortcomings, and it differentiates between the ordinary shortcomings that all parents have and more serious problems in parenting. This book is an excellent resource for therapists, school counselors, group leaders, and others who work with children and teenagers and who want reading materials to recommend to them.

Do You Have An Aging Parent Who -- Blames you for everything that goes wrong? Cannot tolerate being alone, wants you all the time? Is obsessed with health problems, real, or imagined? Make unreasonable and/or irrational demands of you? Is hostile, negative and critical? Coping with these traits in parents is an endless high-stress battle for their children. Though there's no medical defination for "difficult" parents, you know when you have one. While it's rare for adults to change their ways late in life, you can stop the vicious merry-go-round of anger, blame, guilt and frustration. For the first time, here's a common-sense guide from professionals, with more than two decades in the field, on how to smooth communications with a challenging parent. Filled with practical tips for handling contentious behaviors and sample dialogues for some of the most troubling situations, this book addresses many hard issues, including: How to tell your parent he or she cannot live with you. How to avoid the cycle of nagging and recriminations How to prevent your parent's negativity from overwhelming you. How to deal with an impaired parent who refuses to stop driving. How to asses the risk factors in deciding whether a parent is still able to live alone.

This book provides tips and strategies to help school leaders improve, neutralize, or eliminate resistant and negative teachers. Learn how to handle staff members who gossip in the teacher's lounge, consistently say "it won't work" when any new idea is suggested, send an excessive number of student to your office for disciplinary reasons, undermine your efforts toward school improvement, or negatively influence other staff members. Don’t miss the revised and expanded third edition of this best-seller!

"No one book resolves a lifetime of hurts and misunderstandings, but it can remove the blinders from our eyes. Make an effort now." LOS ANGELES TIMES No matter how old you are and whether or not your parents are alive, you have to come to terms with them. This wise and practical book will show you how to deal with the most fundamental relationships in your life and, in the process, become the happy, creative, and fulfilled person you are meant to be.

What happens to Queen Bees and Wannabes when they grow up? Even the most well-adjusted moms and dads can experience peer pressure and conflicts with other adults that make them act like they’re back in seventh grade. In Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads, Rosalind Wiseman gives us the tools to handle difficult situations involving teachers and other parents with grace. Reassuring, funny, and unfailingly honest, Wiseman reveals: • Why PTA meetings and Back-to-School nights tap into parents’ deepest insecurities • How to recognize the archetypal moms and dads—from Caveman Dad to Hovercraft Mom • How and when to step in and step out of your child’s conflicts with other children, parents, teachers, or coaches • How to interpret the code phrases other parents use to avoid (or provoke) confrontation • Why too many well-meaning dads sit on the sidelines, and how vital it is that they step up to the plate • What to do and say when the playing field becomes an arena for people to bully and dominate other kids and adults • How to have respectful yet honest conversations with other parents about sex and drugs when your values are in conflict • How the way you handle parties, risky behavior, and academic performance affects your child • How unspoken assumptions about race, religion, and other hot-button subjects sabotage parents’ ability to work together Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads is filled with the kind of true stories that made Wiseman’s New York Times bestselling book Queen Bees & Wannabes impossible to put down. There are tales of hardworking parents with whom any of us can identify, along with tales of outrageously bad parents—the kind we all have to reckon with. For instance, what do you do when parents donate a large sum of money to a school and their child is promptly transferred into the honors program–while your son with better grades doesn’t make the cut? What about the mother who helps her daughter compose poison-pen e-mails to yours? And what do you say to the parent-coach who screams at your child when the team is losing? Wiseman offers practical advice on avoiding the most common parenting “land mines” and useful scripts to help you navigate difficult but necessary conversations. Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads is essential reading for parents today. It offers us the tools to become wiser, more relaxed parents–and the inspiration to speak out, act according to our values, show humility, and set the kind of example that will make a real difference in our children’s lives. Also available as a Random House AudioBook and as an eBook

A large segment of the population struggles with feelings of being detached from themselves and their loved ones. They feel flawed, and blame themselves. Running on Empty will help them realize that they're suffering not because of something that happened to them in childhood, but because of something that didn't happen. It's the white space in their family picture, the background rather than the foreground. This will be the first self-help book to bring this invisible force to light, educate people about it, and teach them how to overcome it.

From experienced therapist Ron Taffel--widely known for his popular parenting guides--this is a commonsense handbook for any mental health, education, or medical professional working with challenging kids and parents. Provided are concrete strategies for building rapport with stressed-out families, getting children and adolescents to talk about what really matters, spotting developmental and psychiatric problems before a crisis develops, and developing skills to strengthen kids' self-esteem and parents' effectiveness in setting limits. Illustrative case vignettes get to the heart of what is going wrong between youngsters and their parents and show how simple, concrete interventions can make a big difference. Also covered in depth are ways for professionals to handle their own emotional responses in highly charged situations.