When Kids Call the Shots: How to Seize Control from Your Darling Bully -- and Enjoy Being a Parent Again

by Sean Grover

Overview

If you want to fix your rebellious and disrespectful child, you need to start by fixing yourself.

Are your kids pummeling you with demands and bossing you around with impunity? Have your once-precious preschoolers become rebellious, entitled, and disrespectful to authority? While there are plenty of so-called experts who might try to validate your convictions that you have done all you can to "fix" your "difficult" children, the hard truth is, they're not doing you any favors by placing the responsibility solely on your children. Parenting struggles rarely originate from just one side. Instead, they erupt at the volatile intersection of a child's personality with a parent's own insecurities and behaviors.

In When Kids Call the Shots, therapist and parenting expert Sean Grover untangles the forces driving family dysfunction, and helps parents assume their leadership roles once again. Parents will discover:

• Three common bullying styles used by kids
• Parenting styles that contribute to power balances
• Critical testing periods in a child's development
• Coping mechanisms that backfire
• Personalized plans for calmly exerting authority in any scenario

The solution to any problem begins with learning to control what you can control. In parenting, you've already learned how impossible it is to control your kids. Begin by controlling you!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814436004
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	06/03/2015
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

SEAN GROVER, LCSW, has worked in child development and adult psychotherapy for 20 years, and maintains one of the largest private group therapy practices in the U.S. He has been quoted in Newsweek, New York Magazine, NPR, and elsewhere about parent-child relationships.

Read an Excerpt

Something’s gone wrong in your relationship with your kid. You can’t put your finger on it. You’re not sure when it happened, you’re not sure how it happened, but you know that you want to make your relationship right again—as soon as possible. There’s only one problem: You haven’t got a clue what to do.

You coach yourself. “Stay optimistic. It’s just a phase. It will pass. Be positive.” You cross your fingers and hope for the best.

But such thoughts offer little comfort. When your relationship with your kid is out of whack, “hope” doesn’t cut it. In fact, nothing in your life feels right. You spend many sleepless nights feeling brokenhearted and lost. I know—I’ve been there.

Parenting is a messy business, filled with unexpected turns and twists. You need new skills to overcome these problems—and fast. Even the most devoted parents can feel flummoxed by their kids.

“I thought I was doing everything right. Why is this happening?”

Rebooting Your Relationship

Seeking professional advice is always a good idea, but before you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on therapy, behavior modification programs, or medication or submit your child to personality assessments and neurological testing, let’s consider some steps that you can take right now.

Children are complicated, but their needs are not. As we’ll learn in Chapter 2, every child has five basic needs. Meet those five needs, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your kid’s behavior and mood improve. However, if those essential needs aren’t met, turning around your relationship with your kid could be infinitely more difficult.

Rather than muck up parenting with too much analysis or obsessiveness, let’s keep it simple and stick to basics. Often, the solutions to problems in your relationship are hiding in plain sight. In fact, remedying your situation with your kid could be easier than you think.

For example, for quite a while I had a leak under my kitchen sink. No matter what I did, the leak reappeared. Plumbers told me that the pipes were installed wrong, the drain was off center, the sink had to be moved. Each estimate was for hundreds of dollars that I didn’t want to spend. After all, it was just a tiny drip!

So I went to my local hardware store and spoke to one of the old-timers. Without missing a beat, he said, “Try changing the washers.” He sold me three thirty-five-cent washers. And the pipes never leaked again.

So before you freak out and hire an army of mental health professionals to fix your kid, before you research social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, or psychotherapists (I’ll explain exactly what these folks do in Chapter 7), before you blame yourself or your partner or spend sleepless nights feeling guilty, take a moment and consider this: You don’t need to start all over; you might just need to change the washers.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Escape the Suffering Parents Club

2 What Happened to My Sweet, Adorable Child?

3 How We Become Our Kids’ Victims—and Strategies to Prevent Parent Burnout

4 Understanding Your Kid’s Bullying Behavior Style

5 Your Parenting Style—and How Good Parents Fall into Bad Habits

6 Tools to Give You Both Just the Right Amount of Power

7 How to Assemble Your Anti-Bullying Support Team

8 Navigating the Seven Parenting Crises That Can Trigger Bullying

Index

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/06/2015
Psychotherapist Grover pulls no punches in this parenting manual, labeling out-of-control children and teens as bullies and identifying the parents they mistreat as victims. He categorizes child bullying styles (defiant, manipulative, anxious) and unproductive parenting styles (guilty, anxious, fix-everything). He also provides a helpful map of the interactions that can lead to the escalation of bullying, from developmentally normal behaviors like boundary-testing to crisis situations such as illness, divorce, and unrecognized learning issues. Grover breaks down the basics of healthy emotional development, including self-esteem, structure, and role models. He challenges parents to better communicate with their children while also practicing improved self-care and examining their own family histories, mental landscapes, and coping mechanisms. Overall, Grover’s empowering, motivating approach is highly compassionate to suffering, burnt-out parents without letting them off the hook for becoming self-aware adults who can make consciously better choices for themselves and their children. Agent: Carol Mann, Carol Mann Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

..".fabulous, stupendous, and all around terrific how-to book that helps parents control situations when a child is bullying them." --Grandma Ideas

..".it is nice to have a book like this one to help me learn how to parent better." --Beautiful Mommies

..".lot of good ideas, and common sense approaches to not only getting control of your kids, but most importantly helping you to see what caused the problem..." --Learning Curvy

..".offers readable bites of advice, case studies from his 20 years working with families and personal stories of his own trials as the father of two girls." --Associated Press

.."this is a book I will be reopening for a long time. The advice is easy and sound!" --Maria's Space

"Grover hit his groove in a savvy compilation of how NOT to let your kids get away with tantrums...MUST HAVE BOOK for parents, teachers, and this blogger!" --The Review Broads

"It helps that Grover readily admits mistakes he made in his own parenting, which lets us relate to his teachings--and makes him more believable, too." --Psychcentral.com

"It is as if this book was written just for me...I am learning coping mechanisms that I can use to deal with everyday scenarios and situations..." --All Beautiful Mommies

"Psychotherapist Grover pulls no punches in this parenting manual...[his] empowering, motivating approach is highly compassionate to suffering, burnt-out parents..." --Publishers Weekly

"The art of parenting will be enhanced with this interesting, insightful, and helpful read." -Bookloons

From the Publisher