What to Do When Parenting Gets Painfully Complicated Are your adult child’s mental, emotional, and physical health issues driving you to despair? Are you tempted to bail your son or daughter out of yet another impossible circumstance? When your child has reached (or long since passed) the point of independence, it’s difficult to know what your “help” as a parent should look like. From the author of bestseller Setting Boundaries® with Your Adult Children, Allison Bottke now offers an in-depth guide to help you connect with your troubled adult child, and to build your confidence, knowledge, and hope in challenging situations such as… drug addiction mental and emotional disabilities military trauma and PTSD personality disorders financial trouble depression and bipolar divorce incarceration …and so much more Whether you’re facing these problems for the first time or looking to learn more, take a step back and develop effective strategies to truly help your adult child—without sacrificing your sanity.

Are you struggling to connect with your child now that they've left the nest? Are you feeling the tension and heartache as your relationship dynamic begins to change? In Doing Life with Your Adult Children, bestselling author and parenting expert Jim Burns provides practical advice and hopeful encouragement for navigating this tough yet rewarding transition. If you've raised a child, you know that parenting doesn't stop when they turn eighteen. In many ways, your relationship gets even more complicated--your heart and your head are as involved as ever, but you can feel things shifting, whether your child lives under your roof or rarely stays in contact. Doing Life with Your Adult Children helps you navigate this rich and challenging season of parenting. Speaking from his own personal and professional experience, Burns offers practical answers to the most common questions he's received over the years, including: My child's choices are breaking my heart--where did I go wrong? Is it OK to give advice to my grown child? What's the difference between enabling and helping? What boundaries should I have if my child moves back home? What do I do when my child doesn't seem to be maturing into adulthood? How do I relate to my grown child's significant other? What does it mean to have healthy financial boundaries? How can I support my grown children when I don't support their values? Including positive principles on bringing kids back to faith, ideas on how to leave a legacy as a grandparent, and encouragement for every changing season, Doing Life with Your Adult Children is a unique book on your changing role in a calling that never ends.

A guide for parents whose adult children have cut off contact that reveals the hidden logic of estrangement, explores its cultural causes, and offers practical advice for parents trying to reestablish contact with their adult children. “Finally, here’s a hopeful, comprehensive, and compassionate guide to navigating one of the most painful experiences for parents and their adult children alike.”—Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Labeled a silent epidemic by a growing number of therapists and researchers, estrangement is one of the most disorienting and painful experiences of a parent's life. Popular opinion typically tells a one-sided story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents. However, the reasons for estrangement are far more complex and varied. As a result of rising rates of individualism, an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness, growing economic insecurity, and a historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth, many parents find themselves forever shut out of the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. As a trusted psychologist whose own daughter cut off contact for several years and eventually reconciled, Dr. Joshua Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide parents in navigating these fraught interactions. He helps to alleviate the ongoing feelings of shame, hurt, guilt, and sorrow that commonly attend these dynamics. By placing estrangement into a cultural context, Dr. Coleman helps parents better understand the mindset of their adult children and teaches them how to implement the strategies for reconciliation and healing that he has seen work in his forty years of practice. Rules of Estrangement gives parents the language and the emotional tools to engage in meaningful conversation with their child, the framework to cultivate a healthy relationship moving forward, and the ability to move on if reconciliation is no longer possible. While estrangement is a complex and tender topic, Dr. Coleman's insightful approach is based on empathy and understanding for both the parent and the adult child.

This important and compassionate new book from the creator of the successful God Allows U-Turns series will help parents and grandparents of the many adult children who continue to make life painful for their loved ones. Writing from firsthand experience, Allison identifies the lies that kept her, and ultimately her son in bondage—and how she overcame them. Additional real life stories from other parents are woven through the text. A tough–love book to help readers cope with dysfunctional adult children, Setting Boundaries® with Your Adult Children will empower families by offering hope and healing through S.A.N.I.T.Y.—a six–step program to help parents regain control in their homes and in their lives. S = STOP Enabling, STOP Blaming Yourself, and STOP the Flow of Money A = Assemble a Support Group N = Nip Excuses in the Bud I = Implement Rules/Boundaries T = Trust Your Instincts Y = Yield Everything to God Foreword by Carol Kent (When I Lay My Isaac Down)

How to recognize and cope with Parent Frustration Syndrome (PFS): negative thoughts and feelings about your children"

“Constructive wallowing” seems like an oxymoron. Constructive is a good thing, but wallowing is bad. Right? But wait a minute; is it really so terrible to give ourselves a time-out to feel our feelings? Or is it possible that wallowing is an act of loving kindness, right when we need it most? Just about everyone loves the idea of self-compassion -- the notion that maybe in spite of our messy emotions and questionable behavior, we really aren’t all that bad. In recent years there’s been an explosion of books that encourage readers to stop beating themselves up for being human, which is terrific. Unfortunately, readers who aren’t interested in Buddhism or meditation have been left out in the cold. Self-compassion is an everyday habit that everyone can learn, even if they a) aren't particularly spiritual, b) find most books about self-compassion too serious, or else c) have already overdosed on meditation. Constructive Wallowing: How to Beat Bad Feelings by Letting Yourself Have Them is the first book to cut right to the chase, bypassing descriptions of Eastern philosophy and meditation techniques to teach readers exactly how to accept and feel their feelings with self-compassion for greater emotional health and well-being … while making them laugh from time to time. It seems that the wisdom of “keeping your friends close and your enemies closer” applies to emotions as well as people. It’s tempting to turn away from menacing, uncomfortable feelings like anger, grief or regret and treat them like unwanted guests; however, ignoring them just seems to make them stick around. They lurk in the background like punks with switchblades, waiting to pounce as soon as they see an opening. By learning to accept and embrace, rather than suppress, difficult feelings, people can keep their sense of personal power and, better yet, gain greater understanding and ultimately esteem for themselves. Feeling bad can actually lead to feeling better, faster!

Parents whose adult children have cut off contact wonder: How did this happen? Where did I go wrong? What happened to my loving child? Over time, holidays, birthdays, and even the birth of grandchildren may pass in silence. Anguish may turn into anger. While time, in and of itself, does not necessarily heal, actions do, and while every estrangement includes situation-specific variables, there are practical, effective, and universal techniques for understanding and healing these not-uncommon breaches. Psychotherapist Tina Gilbertson has developed these techniques and tools over years of face-to-face and online work with parents, who have found her strategies transformative and even life-changing. Gilbertson cuts through the blame, shame, and guilt on both sides of the broken relationship. Parents will feel heard and understood but also challenged — and guided — to reclaim their role as"tone setter" and grow psychologically. Exercises, examples, and sample scripts empower parents who have felt powerless. Gilbertson shows that reconciliation is a step-by-step process, but the effort is well worth it. It is never too late to renew relations and experience better-than-ever bonds.