Besides the usual parenting challenges, parents of disabled children face added obstacles that can tax the resolve and resources of even the strongest families. Peggy Lou Morgan has developed a powerful system for obtaining dramatically better care for children with one or more serious disabilities. Parenting Your Complex Child reflects the experience and knowledge she has gained through decades of navigating a sea of complex medical, educational, occupational, and social issues while working with disabled clients and with her own son. Morgan’s unique tracking and documentation tools let parents adapt to their child’s challenges, create routines that support the child’s needs, communicate those needs to busy professionals -- and be taken seriously by them. The book also helps parents lay the groundwork for care to continue after they themselves can no longer provide it. Compassionate, practical, and proven, Parenting Your Complex Child helps parents ensure that life-changing decisions are based on the best interests of the child -- and on the best information available.

Hauer offers hope and practical coping strategies in equal measure.

The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids is an honest guide on how to be an effective parent and when raising children with ADHD, anxiety, and other complex conditions--and how to guide them on a path to a healthy, happy, well-adjusted life. A wake-up call, a clear guide for action, and a message of inspiration, this book provides a reality-based recipe for how to do a masterful job of raising complex kids, while not making yourself (or your family) crazy in the process. ADHD parenting expert Elaine Taylor-Klaus, founder and CEO of ImpactADHD.com, will walk you through her proven coach-approachmethod, which shows all parents, in simple steps, how to identify challenge areas and how to use critical response toolsto parent simply, clearly, and effectively—for everyone’s benefit. It doesn’t much matter if your child has ADHD, or anxiety, or learning disabilities, or sensory processing, or ODD, or autism, or depression, or separation disorder—or celiac disease or food allergies, for that matter. All that really matters is this: your child is complex because there is a chronic medical condition (or several) that he, or she, or they need to learn to manage for themselves in order to be successful in life. A coach approach will help you communicate, collaborate, and guide your kids on their path to independence. Here are some of the challenge areas addressed inside, and the coach-approach method for working through them. Challenge: Feeling Like You've Tried Everything --> Coach-Approach: Letting Go Challenge: Fearing for the Future --> Coach-Approach: Parenting from Inspiration, Not Desperation Challenge: An Unhappy Home --> Coach-Approach: No One Gets to Be Wrong--The Benefits of Positivity Challenge: Overwhelm Is Keeping You Stuck --> Coach-Approach: Focusing on What's Most Important Once you learn the coach-approval model, it can be applied to any situation—in fact, the more you use it, the easier it all becomes. Constant battles don’t have to be part of your daily life. With The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids, you can (all) learn to thrive.

Step-by-step help for overcoming temper tantrums, arguing and defiance, bed- and bath-time resistance, problems getting ready in the morning, homework issues, and more. Includes bibliographical references.

Parenting Children with Mental Health Challenges: A Guide to Life with Emotionally Complex Kids offers overwhelmed readers guidance, solidarity, and hope. The author, a “mental-health mom” who’s survived indignity, exhaustion, and the heartbreak of loving a child with multiple mental-health disorders, writes with frankness and occasional humor about the hardest parenting job on earth. Drawing on her own experiences and those of other parents, plus tips from mental health professionals, Vlock suggests ways of parenting smarter, partnering better, and living more fully and less fearfully in the shadow of childhood psychiatric illness. Addressing the many hurdles children and families must face, including life on the home front, school, friendships and relationships, and more, the book shows readers that they’re not alone—and they are stronger than they think. With its combination of easily digestible, to-the-point suggestions, clear action items, and first-person parent/kid stories, its aim is to make mental-health parents feel stronger and better, while actively seeking positive outcomes for their kids and families. With rates of mental health diagnoses among youth on the rise, this invaluable resource will help parents through the trying times with support, understanding, and guidance.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

Dr. Robert A. Naseef, a psychologist and father of a son with autism, details the daily blessings and challenges of raising a child with disabilities, offering sensitive, real-world advice along the way.