Julie Ross

Yesterday, your child was a sweet, well-adjusted eight-year-old. Today, a moody, disrespectful twelve-year-old. What happened? And more important, how do you handle it? How you respond to these whirlwind changes will not only affect your child's behavior now but will determine how he or she turns out later. Julie A. Ross, executive director of Parenting Horizons, shows you exactly what's going on with your child and provides all the tools you need to correctly handle even the prickliest tween porcupine. Selected Reading Questionnaire.… (mehr)

Not a rave but there are certainly a lot of good approaches here. I argued with the book most of the way through. One of her tenets is that the parent should set all their emotional reactions aside in order to interact with their highly emotional tween child. I agree that it's important to set reactions aside when making good decisions. But the level of personal suppress that's called for is too much. The parent is a person too. It's also quite creepy if the parent is making all interactions so highly scripted and controlled. I guess there's gotta be a happy midpoint somewhere between being bamboozled/infuriated by your kid and being the Stepford Mom.

I was left with the idea that "we're going okay!" and that's always a good feeling.… (mehr)

I reserve the right to change the star rating if these techniques don't work! But Ross did make me think about some of our conflicts in a different way, and I do think using some of her ideas could improve the household communication. And maybe limit the number of sibling fights, which has been skyrocketing lately.

But I don't see us having weekly family meetings. Does anyone else do that? Ross is a big proponent, but it sounds a little bit corny to me. I'm not sure I could even get my husband on board, much less the kids.… (mehr)