Grace Lebow

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 show more 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. show less

COPING WITH YOUR DIFFICULT OLDER PARENT
A Guide for Stressed-Out Children
Grace Lebow and Barbara Kane with Irwin Lebow

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?
• Makes 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. show more Though there’s no medical definition 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. This book is filled with practical tips for handling contentious behaviors and sample dialogues for some of the most troubling situations. show less