Parent Adult Children Relationships

In Our Mothers, Ourselves, Henry Cloud and John Townsend show how understanding how our mothers have profoundly influenced our lives can set us on a path toward wholeness and growth. No one has influenced the person you are today like your mother. The way she handled your needs as a child has shaped your worldview, your relationships, your marriage, your career, your self-image - your life. Our Mothers, Ourselves can help you identify areas that need reshaping, to make positive choices for personal change, and to establish a mature relationship with Mom today.

After surviving a traumatic childhood in 1970s New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly 20 years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, still orbiting around her mother but keeping far enough away to preserve the stable, independent world she has built as a writer and editor. Then Elissa is confronted with the unthinkable.

The pressures faced by children and adolescents today are unprecedented and the corresponding statistics around poor mental health deeply alarming. Behind every mental health issue, from addiction to ADHD, lies a host of underlying problems that need addressing, but as a worried parent it's hard to know where to focus. What do you do if your child struggles with anxiety? Is self-harming? Has developed an unhealthy relationship with eating, exercise, technology or alcohol?

Human, Flawed, Forgiven is a transformative guide that explores the complex journey of forgiveness for one's parents. The narrative is structured to help listeners understand that while parents are inherently flawed—as all humans are—holding onto anger and blame is a self-imposed burden that serves no purpose. It emphasizes that forgiveness is a gift one gives to oneself, a crucial step toward healing and building a healthier, happier life.

This book is considered to be the best account of the Civil War ever written from the Confederate point of view. It is also the one most frequently cited by historians of the Western campaigns. Sam Watkins, a high private in the Army of Tennessee, brings a vividness and detail to his story unmatched in the genre.

Ever since Dusty's mom died, life has been rough. Dusty's dad is remote and angry, and a car accident has permanently injured Dusty's back. No matter how much support her classmates in high school offer, nothing can bring back the happy family life she remembers.

Jazz Dent has been shot and left to die in New York City. His girlfriend Connie is in the clutches of Jazz's serial killer father, Billy. And his best friend Howie is bleeding to death on the floor of Jazz's own home in tiny Lobo's Nod. Somehow, these three must rise above the horrors their lives have become and find a way to come together in pursuit of Billy. But then Jazz crosses a line he's never crossed before, and soon the entire country is wondering: "Like father, like son?" Who is the true monster?

There is a special bond between mothers and their sons, and it never goes away. This book contains some of the best stories and poems from Chicken Soup's library honoring that lifelong relationship between mothers and their male offspring.

Our country is in a profound crisis: a crisis of decency, of civility, of character. And families today are experiencing a new set of realities. Our best instincts are undermined at every turn, and our families, to which we turn in crisis, are feeling the strain. Working parents are harried, tired, and overextended. Mary Pipher understands this. She's a good listener, perhaps the best listener in America. And what she has to say goes straight to the heart.Confronted with today's challenges, parents feel helpless to protect their children from the enemy within their homes: the innapropriate television their kids watch for hours, the computer and virtual reality games that keep them from playing outside, when they should be learning from and about the real world. Compounding this is the fact that our psychological theories don't work anymore. These theories were developed decades ago, when families were tightly knit, relatively monolithic institutions, and they're dated. Pipher argues that such theories are of little help in our violent, sexualized contemporary culture. And while diagnosing the problem is the first step in curing it, Pipher offers ideas for simple actions we can all take to help rebuild our families and strengthen our communities.

Discover how to celebrate your life as an empty nester…without guilt or sorrow. Does your quiet home give you heartaches and tears? Do you not know what to do with your life now that the kids are gone? Becoming an empty nester is a sudden and painful change. It is such a difficult time that 38.6 percent of empty nesters suffer from clinical depression and one in four marriages ends in divorce.

In this beautiful and poignant tribute to her late daughter, award-winning actress and New York Times best-selling author Carol Burnett presents a funny and moving memoir about mothering an extraordinary young woman through the struggles and triumphs of her life.

Whether you're preparing for a college entrance exam or a major business presentation, Ron Fry's How to Study Program equips you for a lifetime of learning. Conversational, approachable, and newly revised, this comprehensive program includes the all-time best seller, How to Study, plus six other helpful study guides.

Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable 9-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness.

Almost every couple faces a "now what?" moment as their last kid moves out of the house. There's a big empty nest looming over this new and uncertain stage in their lives. David and Veronica James chose to look at this next phase of life as a beginning instead of an ending. Rather than staying put and facing the constant reminders of empty bedrooms and backseats, a plan began to develop to sell the nest and hit the highway.

Isabelle Scott and Mirabelle Monroe are still reeling from the revelation that they share more than just the roof over their heads. The media has pounced on their story and the girls are caught up in a flurry of talk-show appearances and newspaper interviews. They’ve put on a happy public face, but someone is leaking their true feelings to the press. While it seems like the world is watching their every move, at least they have each other. But with cotillion season right around the corner, Izzie and Mira have barely had time to process their newfound sisterhood.

New Mark Twain! This previously unpublished Twain piece was written 125 years ago, composed in 1876 as a "blind novelette" that Twain planned to launch as a competition for other great writers of the day. The competition never took place, and the story was thought by many to have been lost. This rediscovered gem, with a new introduction and afterword by Roy Blount, Jr., and brilliantly read by Blount and Garrison Keillor, allows us, once again, to celebrate the literary genius of Mark Twain.

With My Face to the Enemy is one of the most provocative and wide-ranging anthologies on the Civil War to come along in years. Its illuminating essays examine the war from perspectives that were critical to its outcome - the larger-than-life personalities of its important players and the national strategies and key battle tactics that shaped the four-year-long crisis.

Kids, a Primer is a collection of a grandfather's musings on the way his (now grown) children are raising their children and being glad about being a grandparent rather than a new parent with young children (again). While Ungar is convinced that grandparents could do a better job raising children if they had the energy, he is grateful that he, in fact, no longer has the energy.

Kathryn Erskine won the National Book Award for her mesmerizing novel Mockingbird. In The Absolute Value of Mike, a young man grows up during an unlikely adventure. Despite his best efforts, Mike has a hard time communicating with his calculus-loving father - and having a math learning disability certainly doesn’t help. But when Mike is sent to Pennsylvania to work on an engineering project, the young man learns valuable lessons from the colorful characters he meets.

Today’s college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They’re performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they’re “supposed” to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life.