Drawing from culture, stories, and his own personal experience, John Sowers presents the desperate reality of fatherlessness in his generation. Fatherless Generation is a hard-hitting, descriptive look at this issue, showing how awareness, compassion, and mentoring are the keys to writing new stories of hope.

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!

One man shares his story of growing up fatherless, the lessons it taught him, and how sons and parents can combat its side effects. Searching for Dad steps inside the mind, heart, and soul of a boy without a father. Recognizing the power of the emotional and psychological side effects of growing up fatherless will help absentee fathers, single mothers, and sons who survived a fatherless childhood understand and cope. Byron Ricks shares his story about the challenges he faced, the lessons he learned, and the man he became. He writes for fathers who do not realize the full impact their absence can have, for mothers wanting to do the best for their sons but are not sure what that is, and for men who feel empty and unattached and are not sure why. Ultimately, Searching for Dad is a book of hope, filled with illustrations about nine side effects and how fathers, mothers, and sons can forestall, minimize and even reverse them. Growing up fatherless may be the condition; healing is the possibility.

No matter how committed two people are to being together, why can't they get away from feeling something is missing? In this important and transformative guide, three experienced practitioners identify the widespread dysfunctional dynamic they call "irrelationship," a psychological defense system two people create together to protect themselves from the fear and anxiety of real intimacy in a relationship. Drawing on their wide clinical and life experience, the authors examine behavioral "song-and-dance routines" repeatedly performed by couples affected by irrelationship. Readers will find a valuable framework for understanding their challenges with action-oriented tools to help them navigate their way to fulfilling relationships. Mark B. Borg, Jr., PhD, is a community psychologist and psychoanalyst, and a supervisor of psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute. Grant H. Brenner, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist in private practice, specializing in treating mood and anxiety disorders and the complex problems that may arise in adulthood from childhood trauma and loss. Daniel Berry, RN, MHA, has practiced as a Registered Nurse in New York City since 1987 and has worked for almost two decades in community-based programs.

If you are a mother raising a son without a father this book was written for you. What are the 5 major diseases and ailments that your son is more likely to acquire without his father (or a suitable male role model) in his life? What are the 4 critical skills that a father can teach his son that a mother cannot teach? What are the 4 characteristics that adult sons without fathers possess that put them at a disadvantage in developing relationships? These questions-and many more-are answered in this book. Whether they lose their fathers to divorce or death, or whether their fathers go to prison or abandon them at birth, or were simply never in the picture-such as in artificial insemination-boys that grow up in homes without their biological father go through childhood at a disadvantage. There are almost 9 million such sons in America. The authors believe that mothers can overcome those disadvantages with effective parenting tailored to their sons' needs. The authors are convinced that most mothers want to do what is right for their sons, and if that does not always occur, it is usually because they do not always have the right information at their fingertips. Specifically, this book was written for: * Single mothers who are raising sons without a father. * Married mothers contemplating divorce. * Mothers with sons who have remarried. * Lesbian mothers who are raising a son. * Adoptive parents who are raising a son. Most self-help parenting books are "bucket brigade" manuals that are written to help parents put out the fires that arise in the normal course of parenting a child. The authors do that, too, with the problems that are specific to fatherless boys, but their major focus is teaching skills that will help mothers prevent problems from ever developing. Sons who grow up without fathers have different needs, different experiences, and different life expectations from sons who grow up with fathers, and those differences begin in childhood and continue throughout life. Sons with fathers, absent physical or emotional abuse in the family, usually grow up to consider the world to be a friendly place with potential for great good. Without special parenting by their mothers, sons without fathers invariably see the world as an unfriendly place with potential for great harm. Mardi Allen, Ph.D. and James L. Dickerson are co-authors of "How to Screen Adoptive and Foster Parents: A Workbook for Professionals and Students" and "The Basics of Adoption: A Guide for Building Families in the U.S. and Canada." Dr. Allen is a psychologist who counsels families in private practice, clinical liaison for the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, and a former president of the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards. Dickerson is a social work innovator who has developed new programs such as the Foster Parent Syndrome, a screening procedure for selecting adoptive and foster parents, and "You've Got a Friend," a federally funded socialization program for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In addition, he is the author of two health-related books, "Cirrhosis: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed" and "Yellow Fever: A Deadly Disease Poised to Kill Again."

A compelling and controversial exploration of absentee fathers and their impact on the nation.

A Jungian analyst examines masculine identity and the psychological repercussions of ‘fatherlessness’—whether literal, spiritual, or emotional—in the baby boom generation An experience of the fragility of conventional images of masculinity is something many modern men share. Psychoanalyst Guy Corneau traces this experience to an even deeper feeling men have of their fathers’ silence or absence—sometimes literal, but especially emotional and spiritual. Why is this feeling so profound in the lives of the postwar “baby boom” generation—men who are now approaching middle age? Because, he says, this generation marks a critical phase in the loss of the masculine initiation rituals that in the past ensured a boy’s passage into manhood. In his engaging examination of the many different ways this missing link manifests in men's lives, Corneau shows that, for men today, regaining the essential “second birth” into manhood lies in gaining the ability to be a father to themselves—not only as a means of healing psychological pain, but as a necessary step in the process of becoming whole.