Nobody's Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship with Your Mother and Father

Description

Regardless of how much you love your mother and father, no one can get under your skin quite like they do. They can simultaneously be your best friends and your greatest adversaries. They may go out of their way to look after and worry about you and drive you crazy in the process. Whether you're a CEO or schoolteacher, single or married with children, you remain your parents' child; but being a loving daughter or son does not mean you have to allow yourself to be treated (or to act) like a child. In this enduring, but potentially most troublesome relationship of your life, as your parents' child, you are still subject to their demands, criticisms, and manipulations. Nobody's Baby Now empowers you to take charge of creating a more successful, more caring bond with your parents. It's an eye-opening, accessible guide that not only addresses fundamental difficulties in the adult child-parent relationship, but also offers realistic strategies and reasons for reinventing your relationship with your parents. Susan Newman, author of Parenting an Only Child and a social psychologist specializing in family dynamics, tells universally familiar stories based on two years of interviews with 150 adult children. The result: invaluable insights into your own family and inspiration that will help you eliminate problems from guilt trips and holiday conflicts, to money issues and long-standing grudges—no matter how difficult your parents are. Newman takes on the different but common causes of strife, and tells you how to: · establish boundaries · deal with parents' controlling behaviors · accept parents' new partners · deal with sibling problems · address time pressures · handle in-laws and in-law jealousies · prevent interference in how you raise your children · make independent career decisions · cope with money issues. Each chapter delves into these and other disagreements and friction that can arise, providing a series of tips, sample conversations, and checklists leading you to the best approach for improving your relationship with your parents. Even if you are convinced that your parents will never change, you may be astonished to see that by changing your own behavior pattern or attitude toward them you can have a noticeable impact on how they treat you. Nobody's Baby Now gives you the tools to keep disagreements and tension to a minimum, turn intolerable situations around, and guide the transformation of your relationship with your parents into a mature, supportive, and loving connection. Featured in TIME magazine.