When Families Fight

From leading researchers, this book presents important advances in understanding how growing up in a discordant family affects child adjustment, the factors that make certain children more vulnerable than others, and what can be done to help. It is a state-of-the-science follow-up to the authors' seminal earlier work, Children and Marital Conflict: The Impact of Family Dispute and Resolution. The volume presents a new conceptual framework that draws on current knowledge about family processes; parenting; attachment; and children's emotional, physiological, cognitive, and behavioral development. Innovative research methods are explained and promising directions for clinical practice with children and families are discussed.

This husband-and-wife team of expert psychologists has written a wise, practical guide explaining those unpleasant family squabbles and how to turn family conflicts into creative opportunities for family discussion and growth.

What is it that drives people to wage war against their own flesh and blood? Veteran estate planning and elder law attorney P. Mark Accettura sets out to answer this question as he provides a comprehensive list of steps will makers, lawyers, and advisors can take to preserve the most valuable legacy of all: the family itself. Accettura's conclusions are aided by five years of research in psychology, psychiatry, and gerontology. The author concludes that the fight for money and things is not about to object or the money itself, but about what they symbolize: importance, love, security, self-esteem, and immortality. Accettura contrasts famously toxic personages like Leona Helmsley and Sumner Redstone with conspicuously philanthropic testators such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Alfred Nobel. Using the case of philanthropist Brooke Astor as a guide, the author tracks the overlapping phenomena of dysfunctional families, progressive dementia, elder abuse, and probate litigation.

One Canadian in eight volunteered to fight between 1914 and 1918 and more than half of them were enlisted. Soldiers left their families behind to the tender mercy of a tight-fisted government and the Canadian Patriotic Fund, a national charity dominated by its wealthy donors. In time, the soldiers were remembered as the sacrificial heroes who won Canada a respected place in the world. The women who paid in loneliness and poverty were as easily forgotten as their letters, soaked in blood and Flanders mud. Fight or Pay tells the story of what happened to the soldiers' families and their quiet contributions to a fairer deal for Canadians in peace and war.

A Powerful Approach to Bringing God's Grace to Kids Did you know that the way we deal (or don't deal) with our kids' misbehavior shapes their beliefs about themselves, the world, and God? Therefore it's vital to connect with their hearts--not just their minds--amid the daily behavior battles. With warmth and grace, Jim and Lynne Jackson, founders of Connected Families, offer four tried-and-true keys to handling any behavioral issues with love, truth, and authority. You will learn practical ways to communicate messages of grace and truth, how to discipline in a way that motivates your child, and how to keep your relationship strong, not antagonistic. Discipline is more than just a short-term attempt to modify your child's actions--it's a long-term investment to help them build faith, wisdom, and character for life. When you discover a better path to discipline, you'll find a more well-behaved--and well-believed--kid.

Confident Parents, Confident Kids lays out an approach for helping parents—and the kids they love—hone their emotional intelligence so that they can make wise choices, connect and communicate well with others (even when patience is thin), and become socially conscious and confident human beings. How do we raise a happy, confident kid? And how can we be confident that our parenting is preparing our child for success? Our confidence develops from understanding and having a mastery over our emotions (aka emotional intelligence)—and helping our children do the same. Like learning to play a musical instrument, we can fine-tune our ability to skillfully react to those crazy, wonderful, big feelings that naturally arise from our child’s constant growth and changes, moving from chaos to harmony. We want our children to trust that they can conquer any challenge with hard work and persistence; that they can love boundlessly; that they will find their unique sense of purpose; and they will act wisely in a complex world. This book shows you how. With author and educator Jennifer Miller as your supportive guide, you'll learn: the lies we’ve been told about emotions, how they shape our choices, and how we can reshape our parenting decisions in better alignment with our deepest values. how to identify the temperaments your child was born with so you can support those tendencies rather than fight them. how to align your biggest hopes and dreams for your kids with specific skills that can be practiced, along with new research to support those powerful connections. about each age and stage your child goes through and the range of learning opportunities available. how to identify and manage those big emotions (that only the parenting process can bring out in us!) and how to model emotional intelligence for your children. how to deal with the emotions and influences of your choir—the many outside individuals and communities who directly impact your child’s life, including school, the digital world, extended family, neighbors, and friends. Raising confident, centered, happy kids—while feeling the same way about yourself—is possible with Confident Parents, Confident Kids.

As a psychotherapist, parent educator and parent coach, Alyson Schäfer has worked with a great many mothers who, in the quest to be a "good mother" have ended up on the door step of despair. Alyson is a forty-something, suburbanite, working-mother of two and can speak to these issues both personally and professionally. This book explains the psycho-social phenomena of how each person creates their own unique "good mother myth" and then examines why these myths are not only faulty, but could in fact lead to poor parenting, marital disaster and individual crisis. Her years of educating parents around these concepts afford Alyson the skill to take complex ideas and explain them to a lay audience in a compelling and easy to understand way. Capitalizing on the need to present parents with information in an easy to digest format, the book is presented as a series of personal stories, each highlighting a common parenting myth. This format will appeal to tired parents who have little time and energy for "academia". Instead, readers learn by taking a voyeuristic peek into the private family lives of the book's characters. Readers can identify with the fictitious parents and coaching clients in the stories and see first hand how the characters ’ life experiences shaped their unique "good mother myths" and how these myths create conflict in their lives. The author offers up ideas for how the character can reject her current thinking and adopt a more useful outlook to improve her situation. The story arc allows readers to identify and then project how their parenting may be unknowingly going off the rails. The goal of this book is to provide parents with some basic education and a means of self-discovery. Readers uncover their own good mother myths and are given an eye-opening glimpse into potential issues to challenge their thinking. A great sense of empowerment is restored as mothers become better able to resist the pulls of their personal and cultural myths, and instead begin parenting with greater intention and in ways that are more suitable to proper child guidance.

There is a significant difference between a conflict, an argument, and a fight. A conflict is an incompatibility of viewpoints that lasts an extended amount of time. An argument is an exchange of different ideas; it's shorter but can become heated if you're not careful. A fight is defined as a violent confrontation. Conflicts are unavoidable, arguments can be managed, but a fight is something to be avoided. Children who witness their parents fighting can become deeply affected by it. It can have a negative impact not only on their mental health but also on their relationships and ability to solve conflict productively in their own lives. Kids are sponges, soaking up the behavior they see in the world and mimicking it as a way of learning how to interact with others. This book is here to teach you how to adjust the way you approach conflict to have a positive effect on your children rather than a negative one. In this book, you'll learn: How witnessing constant fighting can make children feel unsafe and unstable, and can result in them having difficulty sustaining positive relationships. The difference between constructive conflict and destructive fighting. How to prepare for conflict to minimize the damage it can do. Strategies to stop a fight before it happens and turn it into solution-finding. It's time to turn conflict into a positive learning opportunity rather than a dreaded event. Inside you'll find nine easy tactics to change the way you communicate with your partner that will result in happier kids who feel more secure and are better equipped to resolve their own conflicts. These strategies are easy to understand and implement, and will significantly impact the way disagreements are handled in your household.