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Coping with Your Difficult Older Parent: A Guide For Stressed-Out Children
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,
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.
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,
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.
258 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 1999
186 people are currently reading
315 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
March 2, 2017
Regardless of who you're dealing with, everyone has a backstory and reasons for being the way they are. Some people will, sadly, never change. Some will, frustratingly, get more difficult to be around the older they get. When this person is your parent, who brought you into this world and whom you are "commanded" to respect (see #5 of Moses's ten), dealing with them can be a piece of work which we're not necessarily equipped to do. This book not only provides some insight into why our difficult parent is the way they are, but also gives some useful suggestions as to how we can help, if only to not make their pain, and our pain, worse. It encourages us to find help for ourselves when we need it, and to develop a sense of compassion for ourselves and for the person who is causing us pain. This book goes a long way to explaining that certain "typical" behaviours that some of us are subjected to, are actually rather terrible and "normal" given the person we're dealing with. And while we may not be able to change these behaviours, we can certainly choose better ways of acting, instead of reacting to them. With this information comes power. And with power comes great responsibility. For those of us with enough awareness to read books like these, the responsibility to end trauma, abuse, and neglect when we can, will go a long way to creating a more sane and peaceful world. And it may provide some solace for someone as they near the end of their life as well, as difficult as they may be. The buck stops here.
August 13, 2016
This is the FIRST book I have ever read that pegged my individual situation with perfection! I cannot describe how much helpful information I gleaned from this text! Having a parent who was raised after the Great Depression who was SO controlling and SO fearful and SO angry, I was desperate to find a text that would validate my feelings and experiences and give me concrete, helpful methods of dealing with the situations I was raised in and continually have been forced to live in as an only child. This text is phenomenal and I'm grateful to know that I'm not alone!
July 12, 2022
Great book for anyone with aging parents. There’s a quiz at the beginning to help you identify toxic behaviors and each chapter has some very thought provoking scenarios for you to see how the authors techniques play out. I hope I’ve learned enough from this book to put it into daily practice.
October 6, 2014
This is a fairly helpful book that begins with an interesting questionnaire for you to fill out about your difficult parent. There are 40 questions in six categories. They are Dependency Behaviors, Turnoff Behaviors, Self-Centered Behaviors, Controlling Behaviors, Self-Destructive Behaviors, and Fearfulness Behaviors. In answering this questionnaire, if you answered 10 or fewer for your parent, they're viewed as slightly difficult, 11-20 is moderately difficult, and over 20 is very difficult. I gave my mother a 21. So she's very difficult. That's somewhat hard to accept because she's my mother! But she's changed as she's aged and after Dad died last year and she's a lot more difficult than she ever was before.
The reason why I wrote that the book was "fairly" helpful is that it relies on a lot on role playing scenarios, which I view as only so good. You can put yourself in this situations with your parent and memorize some of these lines and lines of thought, but if the conversation starts going outside of those boundaries, you're screwed. I don't think the book adequately addressed that. Still, it tries to address all six types of parents mentioned above and it does a pretty good job. I could see my mom in some of those scenarios and I could see myself in some of the scenarios in which I was not responding accurately. I need to work on myself. And that's one thing I learned from this book. No matter how frustrated you get with your difficult parent, they're more frustrated and they're not going to change, so you have to learn to become more accepting. I need to hear that, because I get easily frustrated and then I feel guilty. I really need to work on that.
This was a pretty good book. It could have been bigger and better, but it was a good start in a much-ignored area, so I was grateful to have read it. Recommended.
The reason why I wrote that the book was "fairly" helpful is that it relies on a lot on role playing scenarios, which I view as only so good. You can put yourself in this situations with your parent and memorize some of these lines and lines of thought, but if the conversation starts going outside of those boundaries, you're screwed. I don't think the book adequately addressed that. Still, it tries to address all six types of parents mentioned above and it does a pretty good job. I could see my mom in some of those scenarios and I could see myself in some of the scenarios in which I was not responding accurately. I need to work on myself. And that's one thing I learned from this book. No matter how frustrated you get with your difficult parent, they're more frustrated and they're not going to change, so you have to learn to become more accepting. I need to hear that, because I get easily frustrated and then I feel guilty. I really need to work on that.
This was a pretty good book. It could have been bigger and better, but it was a good start in a much-ignored area, so I was grateful to have read it. Recommended.
May 17, 2020
This is an excellent book if your parent is emotionally immature and/or has a cluster B type personality. This book offers lots of anecdotes with scripts you can practice, for difficult conversations, as well as some support in setting boundaries. The advice is balanced but it is sort of tactical.
I recommend also reading David Soules’ book How to Say it to Seniors — to balance some compassion with this, just so it doesn’t sour you completely, or give you a sense of being at war with no middle ground. Soules’ book can help you understand some of the underlying reasons for frustrating behavior in more emotionally mature seniors. Of course everyone is on a spectrum so understanding some of those motivations can help boost your reserves of patience and compassion.
But CWYDOP can help you stick to your guns in the situation where you simply cannot use logic and empathy to help your parent make good choices.
I recommend also reading David Soules’ book How to Say it to Seniors — to balance some compassion with this, just so it doesn’t sour you completely, or give you a sense of being at war with no middle ground. Soules’ book can help you understand some of the underlying reasons for frustrating behavior in more emotionally mature seniors. Of course everyone is on a spectrum so understanding some of those motivations can help boost your reserves of patience and compassion.
But CWYDOP can help you stick to your guns in the situation where you simply cannot use logic and empathy to help your parent make good choices.
June 14, 2011
Terrific! Gives accurate examples & scenarios and teaches strategies & limits for being respectful to both your parent(s) and yourself. This book pinpoints how culture, family structure, and family history play huge roles in the communication dynamics that occur. It also covers elderly depression very well.
July 8, 2018
I guess I expected a little more from this book than the authors gave us.
January 27, 2024
This was a difficult book to read. But in the way that it made me mad. It was reading Reddit over and over again. And it stressed me out.
February 14, 2021
Helped me feel a little less alone in my care giving.
March 7, 2021
Well, first of all, I now know my sister and I are not alone with our extremely difficult mother. That is comforting.
A lot of the techniques to deal with impossible behaviours my sister and I are already using, with varied success. It was hard to read that my only hope is to change my behaviours even more.
I guess in some dream world I was hoping for a way out of what is a nightmare, really. I was surprised a few years back to learn that my grandmother became just as difficult, and I wonder if my mother had been exposed to her in those years (they lived in different countries and my mother visited her very rarely and never in my grandmother's last years), would have made any difference now, in terms being so awful to her grown children.
it is such a depressing subject, but I am happy someone wrote a book to make me see I am not alone.
A lot of the techniques to deal with impossible behaviours my sister and I are already using, with varied success. It was hard to read that my only hope is to change my behaviours even more.
I guess in some dream world I was hoping for a way out of what is a nightmare, really. I was surprised a few years back to learn that my grandmother became just as difficult, and I wonder if my mother had been exposed to her in those years (they lived in different countries and my mother visited her very rarely and never in my grandmother's last years), would have made any difference now, in terms being so awful to her grown children.
it is such a depressing subject, but I am happy someone wrote a book to make me see I am not alone.
June 2, 2021
While none of the personalities or situations listed in this book matched my current situation (most were much more extreme), I found this book extremely helpful. I was able to take bits and pieces from almost every chapter and work their suggestions to fit my situation. This book helped to be more empathetic to my aging parent situation and have a better understanding of their behavior. I learned to see their behavior as coping mechanisms to current loss traumas from their past. Using coping mechanisms (for better or for worse) is something I very much relate to and understand from my own life. The books suggested responses to these behaviors (most were tiny tiny changes) are making huge differences. This book has been a huge help.
July 15, 2017
What I most got out of this book was an understanding that I was not alone and my experiences with my parents were not unique. It helped in the sense that I realized that I was not doing anything wrong, and that my parents were not bad people, just old. Hopefully, there are some lessons that I learned and can take with me as I age and eventually become elderly.
May 10, 2015
I just read bits and pieces of this book that related to my own experiences. It offered me helpful guidance on understanding my parent's overbearing and controlling behaviors, and encouraged me to set better boundaries.
September 3, 2019
Discouraging, but a good reminder I'm not alone in my frustrations. The frequent reminders of what your parents are going through was annoying at the time, but they sort of sunk in. We'll see if they help!
August 24, 2017
This was recommended by my mothers geriatric doc. It was so on the money for me. I found both parents here and it truly very helpful. I finally felt I was not alone.
December 30, 2019
Caregivers are not alone
I recognized familiar situations, and it was comforting to know that scenarios were common enough to land in this book. Good perspective.
I recognized familiar situations, and it was comforting to know that scenarios were common enough to land in this book. Good perspective.
January 21, 2024
It's often said that a mental illness is not someone's fault, but it is their responsibility. This book, however, seems to absolve the elderly of both fault and responsibility. More than this, the authors refer to personality disorders by name only in the appendix, opting for the phrase "personality difference" instead, and even appear to doubt the existence of mental illnesses in the aforementioned appendix, putting the term in air quotes.
In the main part of the book, the authors frame eight different dimensions of difficult behavior and provide useful insights and possible explanations for each, but they place the onus for change solely on the adult children. It is the grown children--I refuse to use the authors' preferred cutesy portmanteau--who must navigate the minefields of their parents' behaviors, as this book fails to ask the parents to partake in diffusing their own mines. This, in my opinion, deprives the elderly of agency by denying them any responsibility for their actions.
While the authors occasionally acknowledge that older parents can be abusive, nowhere is it stared that they have the responsibility to change their behavior and stop harming those around them. This, my friends, enables abuse, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong, especially for authors who are practitioners in the mental and behavioral health fields.
Personality disorders may be among the most intransigent DSM disorders, and recovering from them is undoubtedly made harder the longer these characteristics and behavior patterns accrue, but they can be treated. Denying this prospect robs the elderly of experiencing beneficial connections and genuine happiness in the remaining years of life and perpetuates further abuse on the friends, family, and caretakers around them.
In the main part of the book, the authors frame eight different dimensions of difficult behavior and provide useful insights and possible explanations for each, but they place the onus for change solely on the adult children. It is the grown children--I refuse to use the authors' preferred cutesy portmanteau--who must navigate the minefields of their parents' behaviors, as this book fails to ask the parents to partake in diffusing their own mines. This, in my opinion, deprives the elderly of agency by denying them any responsibility for their actions.
While the authors occasionally acknowledge that older parents can be abusive, nowhere is it stared that they have the responsibility to change their behavior and stop harming those around them. This, my friends, enables abuse, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong, especially for authors who are practitioners in the mental and behavioral health fields.
Personality disorders may be among the most intransigent DSM disorders, and recovering from them is undoubtedly made harder the longer these characteristics and behavior patterns accrue, but they can be treated. Denying this prospect robs the elderly of experiencing beneficial connections and genuine happiness in the remaining years of life and perpetuates further abuse on the friends, family, and caretakers around them.
October 3, 2018
Starting with the assumption that not many people are choosing to read this because it's a good beach book, I'd say it might be useful if your parent is driving you absolutely nuts. The short answer seems to be, "Only if you let them." And then you get some coping mechanisms.
If you, like me, have a parent who's not perfect (as if we are), it's kind of useful if you're just looking for stories of parents who really are a little wacko. Could make you grateful for a parent who's just having some minor issues with growing older, accepting loss, etc.
I wouldn't really suggest this book to others but your mileage could vary.
If you, like me, have a parent who's not perfect (as if we are), it's kind of useful if you're just looking for stories of parents who really are a little wacko. Could make you grateful for a parent who's just having some minor issues with growing older, accepting loss, etc.
I wouldn't really suggest this book to others but your mileage could vary.
November 4, 2021
Alot of this seems like common sense but if you've not needed it or come across this relational type of behavioral information before, this could be helpful. The information was solid and even provable in my personal life. There were specific chapters on difficult behaviors and information on how to mutually deal pleasably with you and your parents. This was written 20 years ago, but the psychology of people doesn't really change.
August 10, 2021
My sister gave me this book and it helped me tremendously to understand the process of aging and how our relationships with our parents change over time.
It has helped me develop empathy and understanding, not only for my parents, but for other “difficult” people in my life. It’s 20 years old, but some tips and suggestions still apply and are relevant.
It has helped me develop empathy and understanding, not only for my parents, but for other “difficult” people in my life. It’s 20 years old, but some tips and suggestions still apply and are relevant.
April 23, 2023
This book was very helpful. I appreciated the quiz at the beginning to determine the types of problems you are experiencing. Then I was able to turn to specific chapters for further reading. While the advice is good, it cannot replace psycho-therapy. The book does a good job of skimming the surface of the issues but the problems cannot be resolved as easy as applying the suggestions.
November 18, 2019
Feeling with aging pareentd
This book came at the right time of my life, this journey has been life long for me but getting more challenging with the death of one parent and my role with the other. Book you may need more than once
This book came at the right time of my life, this journey has been life long for me but getting more challenging with the death of one parent and my role with the other. Book you may need more than once
January 10, 2025
I really liked the pull-out advice for dealing with cantankerous and unreasonable parents. The sample dialogue is helpful, too. Sometimes you don't need to try to change a decades-old frame of mind. You can just learn a simple way to defuse it.
February 26, 2025
Me pareció muy útil y práctico, da recomendaciones sencillas de seguir, algunas las pude poner en práctica de inmediato y empezar a obtener resultados. Además ayuda mucho leer otras situaciones parecidas en los ejemplos que ponen en el libro.
February 4, 2018
Very interesting . Brought a lot of information about concerns with mother
June 21, 2018
Helpful book!
May 30, 2022
Easier said than done!
September 8, 2025
Skimmed for what I needed. Very informative.
July 16, 2020
Did not provide anything helpful in my situation.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews