Getting Through to Difficult Kids and Parents: Uncommon Sense for Child Professionals

From experienced therapist Ron Taffel--widely known for his popular parenting guides--this is a commonsense handbook for any mental health, education, or medical professional working with challenging kids and parents. Provided are concrete strategies for building rapport with stressed-out families, getting children and adolescents to talk about what really matters, spotting developmental and psychiatric problems before a crisis develops, and developing skills to strengthen kids' self-esteem and parents' effectiveness in setting limits. Illustrative case vignettes get to the heart of what is going wrong between youngsters and their parents and show how simple, concrete interventions can make a big difference. Also covered in depth are ways for professionals to handle their own emotional responses in highly charged situations.

Ron Taffel, PhD, has supervised and written about working with children and families for over two decades. He is one of the country’s most sought-after speakers for both professional and parent audiences. Dr. Taffel is the award-winning author of over 100 academic and popular articles, and has been a contributing editor to McCall’s and Parents magazines for 14 years. His childrearing guides, translated into numerous languages, include the critically acclaimed Parenting by Heart, Nurturing Good Children Now, and When Parents Disagree, as well as the professional handbooks Getting Through to Difficult Kids and Parents and Breaking Through to Teens. His latest popular book on adolescence, he Second Family, was recently released in paperback. Dr. Taffel is the founder of Family and Couples Treatment Services at The Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy in New York City, where he lives with his wife and two children.