Imperfect Parenting: How to Build a Relationship With Your Child to Weather any Storm (APA LifeTools Series)

This book presents a model of authoritative parenting that makes room for imperfection, focusing on the skills needed to build a strong parent-child relationship.

As parents, we often worry we’re making the wrong decisions. The good news is, having a strong relationship with your child means you can make a parenting blunder from time to time, and exercise grace and patience to try again.
 
Written for parents of children from birth to young adulthood (ages 0-24), this book helps you examine your role as a guide, cheerleader, advocate, and most importantly, as a human being who doesn’t always have the right answers. While your child’s brain, body, emotions, and social abilities develop over time, author Dona Matthews shows how your skills as a parent can be developed too, by practicing relationship fundamentals such as acceptance, positivity, social support, boundaries, respect, self-care, and gratitude.
 
Rooted in the latest findings from neuroscience and psychology, this book presents a model of authoritative parenting that embraces imperfection. Each chapter focuses on a key relationship skill for parenting, with tips on how to practice it during different stages of your child’s growth and in common stressful situations such as social, school, health, and family scenarios.
 

Dona Matthews, PhD, has worked with children, families, and schools since 1990, and is currently in private practice in Toronto, Canada. She was executive director, Millennium Dialogue on Early Child Development, University of Toronto, and founding director, Hunter College Center for Gifted Studies and Education, City University of New York. She has published widely on child and adolescent development, education, and supporting special needs. She frequently shares with parents ways to practice love and respect during each phase of their child’s development, learning and growing alongside their children. Follow Dr. Matthews at her Psychology Today blog, “Going Beyond Intelligence.”