Editorial Review:

Product Description:
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, including:

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.

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• Elder Rage, or Take My Father... Please!: How to Survive Caring for Aging Parents
• The Complete Eldercare Planner, Second Edition: Where to Start, Which Questions to Ask, and How to Find Help
• The Caregiver's Survival Handbook: How to Care for Your Aging Parent Without Losing Yourself
• Taking Care of Parents Who Didn't Take Care of You: Making Peace with Aging Parents
• Are Your Parents Driving You Crazy? Expanded Second Edition: Getting to Yes with Competent, Aging Parents
• see more

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Rating: - Informative but...
...dry. Lots of useful information, but I prefer Elder Rage by Jacqueline Marcell for an informative book that is very readable. I found myself skipping chapters in Coping that I felt were not relevent and skimming topics that seemed to fit. Lots of clinical examples and dialogs. I highlighted a lot of this book and passed it along to my brothers so they could better care for our mom. Useful, but not a page turner.

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Rating: - didn't meet my needs
This book addresses some of the "normal" problems or issues adult children may encounter as their parents age, for instance, how to coax a parent to stop driving when the parent can no longer do so safely. The book doesn't address how adult survivors of dysfunctional families can handle truly "difficult" parents as they age. I'd have been glad to have had the kinds of "difficult" parents described in this book! This book appears to use the word "difficult" to mean, essentially, "inconvenient."

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Rating: - Helps keep grown children in the sandwich generation sane
This book was excellent. I was having such a time dealing emotionally with my parent's behaviour and was trying to use strategies that just were'nt working. Now I know why. I've changed my strategies and can say we have all seen progress in how we are getting along. I also like that the book offers advice on how to avoid becoming a difficult older parent yourself. If you're looking for a book that offers advice and you are willing to change, this is it. If you're not willing to change, don't bother reading it.

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Rating: - A must read for "Stressed-Out children"
As a stressed out adult child of a mother who has been lapsing into dementia for the past 6 years, I found this book to be a great resource. It's a great combination of theory and highlighted points and application through illustrative anecdotes. It's one of my books I refer back to time and again, rather than a one sit-down read.

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Rating: - Spot on
A lot of real life information. Chapters 3 and 4 described my mother-in-law to a tee. A lot of good suggestions on handling interactions and keeping conversations productive and moving forward.