Dial Up the Dream: Make Your Daughter's Journey to Adulthood the Best-For Both of You

by Colleen O'Grady

Overview

This polished, inviting parenting guide illuminates the relationship between mothers and teen daughters."—Publishers Weekly

Your daughter is growing up, but you don’t have to grow apart.

Picking up where her national bestseller, Dial Down the Drama, left off, Colleen O’Grady’s Dial Up the Dream supports you in navigating your daughter’s last days at home and her transition to adulthood. This emerging-adult stage can be even more stressful on both mother and daughter than the teen years, because the stakes are higher and the changes to the relationship more profound.

This essential guidebook will validate what you are feeling and experiencing with your daughter right now as well as give you a road map for what’s coming. Dial Up the Dream will prepare moms for the three phases they will go through during the late teens and early twenties. The first goal is to preserve the relationship during senior year and not get preoccupied with the future, i.e. falling into the “college trap”. The second phase is when your daughter leaves home, whether it’s to live with roommates, travel, enter the workforce, try entrepreneurship, or go to college. As she gains her independence, you’re losing a job that’s defined you for nearly two decades. While she gets ceremonies and congratulations, there’s no accompanying ritual or even acknowledgment for the changes in your life. The third phase is letting go, which can trigger a “mom crisis.” O’Grady helps you get unstuck, make sense of your own story, reconnect with yourself and dial up your dream. The paradox is that when you dial up your own dream...you stay close to your daughter.

In this book, you’ll learn:

· Exactly what’s going on with your daughter emotionally and physiologically. And how to use this science-based knowledge to set realistic expectations

· How to think about and navigate the many complex feelings in this journey for both you and your daughter

· The most common emotional traps we moms get caught in during these years and how to avoid them altogether

· Why it’s imperative to change your parenting role from monitor to trusted consultant—and how to do that· How to use this new phase in your daughter’s life to dial up your own dreams—and why doing so is imperative to your daughter’s development and to a having a vibrant, meaningful, lifelong mother-daughter relationship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781774581452
Publisher:	Page Two Books, Inc.
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	1,093,921
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Colleen O’Grady is a family therapist who is changing what’s possible for moms and their daughters. Her first book, Dial Down the Drama, was a national bestseller. Her podcast, Power Your Parenting: Moms with Teens, was ranked a number 1 podcast on Feedspot. With listeners in all fifty states and over sixty countries around the world, it also made the Top Ten podcasts on YourTeen.com and GrownandFlown.com. She holds a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Houston-Clear Lake and has a private practice in Houston, Texas. An approved supervisor with the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists on a state and national level for nineteen years, she has consulted in inpatient psychiatric hospitals and women’s shelters; supervised family therapy teams at both University of Texas Mental Science Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital Learning Support Center, and received multiple awards for her invaluable contributions, support, and teaching.She has also been a mom in the trenches with her own twenty-five-year-old daughter.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Junior-Senior Parenting Zone 7

2 The Maturity Gap… Why You're Confused 25

3 Letting Go 41

4 Five Key Facets for Laying a New Foundation 57

5 The Consultant 73

6 Setbacks 89

7 Healing Conversations 105

8 The Morn Crisis 121

9 Your Second Draft 135

10 Reconnecting to You 151

11 Dial Up Your Dream 167

12 The Choice 185

Acknowledgments 201

Editorial Reviews

08/08/2022

With a focus on the “challenges, obstacles, stressors, and traps” for the mother-daughter relationship during the tricky “emerging-adult” stage of teen girls’ lives, therapist O’Grady (Dial Down the Drama) offers clear-eyed, practical guidance for mothers about facing drama, rash decisions, and general edgy teen-ness with love and understanding—all while protecting the daughter and the relationship. “Though your daughter is less dependent on you and spending most of her time with her friends, you’re still important to her,” O’Grady writes, “Even though she acts like you’re not.” O’Grady examines sometimes fractious mother-daughter relationships during this period, identifying common communication techniques that make connection between moms and teens challenging, and offering in their place “Powerful Parenting Messages” that she guides readers in crafting and embodying.

Dial Up the Dream argues that, while the mother/daughter relationship changes during these years, there’s no reason that its enduring essence must. To that end, O’Grady writes frankly of the conjoined grief and relief of her own daughter’s leaving for college and the process of letting her go after monitoring her so intimately for so long. Throughout, she writes with the patience of a friend but the authority of a therapist, addressing common fears, worries, and travails, reminding readers that their feelings are familiar and natural, and offering help to calm them. “Expect it to be messy,” she writes, of a daughter’s experimentation with adult selves.

Whether she’s warning against prying, illuminating what transpires in a young person’s not-quite-mature brain, or addressing how to handle a daughter’s setbacks and disappointments, O’Grady proves assured and inviting, offering wisdom—"As the consultant, Mom’s role is one of a coach”—that her book exemplifies: it’s a work of first-rate coaching itself. The guide addresses many everyday issues, though O’Grady wisely leaves issues of addiction or mental illness to the professionals. Smart, concise action steps, exercises, and chapter summaries round out this polished, approachable volume.

Takeaway: This polished, inviting parenting guide illuminates the relationship between mothers and teen daughters.

Great for fans of: Josh Shipp’s The Grown-Up’s Guide to Teenage Humans; Frances E. Jensen and Amy Ellis Nutt’s The Teenage Brain.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: NA Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

2022-09-28
A parenting guide that aims to help mothers support their daughters.

At the start of this book, therapist and coach O’Grady, author of Dial Down the Drama (2015), advises readers to create a “Powerful Parenting Message,” offering an example: “I trust my daughter and support her in her best next step. I choose to listen to, enjoy, and stay connected with my daughter.” The support may take many forms, she points out, and the “next step” may be hard to predict, but the book emphasizes the crucial role of listening throughout. Drawing on her own experiences as a mother and nearly 30years of counseling parents as a marriage and family therapist, O’Grady presents her readers with straightforward discussions of a wide array of subjects, from learning how to let go when daughters leave home for school—including how to retire the “monitoring” part of parenting, which she notes can stick around in unhealthy forms—to setting common-sense boundaries. Each chapter ends with an exercise to help mothers act on what they’re reading, such as journaling about a daughter’s positive traits: “One thing you are grateful for in your daughter,” “One thing you delight in about your daughter,” and so on. Over the course of this parenting manual, readers will find that O’Grady’s advice is uniformly sound and empathetic; one will immediately feel as if one is in caring hands, but there’s a toughness here, as well. Her willingness to tackle darker subjects, including what to do if one’s daughter is sexually assaulted, only makes its unaffected directness more valuable. The prose is appealingly direct throughout: “Are you an adult just because you turn eighteen? Neuroscience doesn’t think so.” The book’s many anecdotes about mothering struggles are instructive, but O’Grady’s own strong, patient advice is its highlight.

A forceful and wide-ranging advice book for readers raising young women.

Kirkus Reviews