Nobody's Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship with Your Mother and Father (Hardcover)

~ Susan Newman Ph.D. (Author) "Researchers and writers have ideas all the time that for the most part remain undeveloped unless others stand behind them..." (more)
Key Phrases: friendship model, most adult children, many adult children, New York, New Jersey

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...Newman's wise and practical approaches promise less guilt-ridden, more compatible relationships with even the most difficult parents." -- Susan Ginsberg, Ed.D., Editor & Publisher,

"...Professionals and adult children will want to keep this volume handy..." -- Bonnie Markham, Ph.D., Psy.D, Adjunct Faculty, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School-UMDNJ

"A superb survival guide for all adults seeking a better understanding of—and a more rewarding relationship with—their parents." -- Joshua Piven, author of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook

"Clear, clever and sensible...guides you over the inevitable potholes..." -- Myron Gessner, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Product Description

Regardless of how much you love your mother and father, no one can get under your skin quite like they do. They can simultaneously be your best friends and your greatest adversaries. They may go out of their way to look after and worry about you and drive you crazy in the process. Whether you’re a CEO or schoolteacher, single or married with children, you remain your parents’ child; but being a loving daughter or son does not mean you have to allow yourself to be treated (or to act) like a child.

In this enduring, but potentially most troublesome relationship of your life, as your parents’ child, you are still subject to their demands, criticisms, and manipulations. Nobody's Baby Now empowers you to take charge of creating a more successful, more caring bond with your parents. It’s an eye-opening, accessible guide that not only addresses fundamental difficulties in the adult child-parent relationship, but also offers realistic strategies and reasons for reinventing your relationship with your parents.

Susan Newman, author of Parenting an Only Child and a social psychologist specializing in family dynamics, tells universally familiar stories based on two years of interviews with 150 adult children. The result: invaluable insights into your own family and inspiration that will help you eliminate problems from guilt trips and holiday conflicts, to money issues and long-standing grudges--no matter how difficult your parents are. Newman takes on the different but common causes of strife, and tells you how to:

· establish boundaries
· deal with parents’ controlling behaviors
· accept parents’ new partners
· deal with sibling problems
· address time pressures
· handle in-laws and in-law jealousies
· prevent interference in how you raise your children
· make independent career decisions
· cope with money issues

Each chapter delves into these and other disagreements and friction that can arise, providing a series of tips, sample conversations, and checklists leading you to the best approach for improving your relationship with your parents.

Even if you are convinced that your parents will never change, you may be astonished to see that by changing your own behavior pattern or attitude toward them you can have a noticeable impact on how they treat you. Nobody's Baby Now gives you the tools to keep disagreements and tension to a minimum, turn intolerable situations around, and guide the transformation of your relationship with your parents into a mature, supportive, and loving connection. Featured in TIME magazine

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802714072
• ISBN-13: 978-0802714077
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #309,811 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Down with the Queen of Difficult, October 31, 2003

By	Aleida Lamb "Triplet's mom" (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews

Down with the Queen of Difficult

The words, difficult, stubborn, nosy, busy-body, controlling, demanding were invented for my mother.

She was always in my face about what I wore, the latest guy, when am I going to settle down, telling me not to see this friend or that. She had to know every detail of my life. She made me utterly miserable, then I read "Nobody's Baby Now.' Voila! I can handle her now. Newman offers ideas on how to change YOUR thinking about a needy parent and she shows you how
to make a parent feel loved while you pull back from her. I learned at age 32 I'm an adult, and I can make some of the rules about our relationship and do it nicely. What a blessing this book has been for me.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Is A Book For Adults, June 16, 2003

By	Richard J. Levinson (Amherst, Ohio) - See all my reviews

If you think you have a dysfunctional relationship with your parents and that they are the root cause for your unhappiness then this book is not for you. If, instead, you are an adult who takes responsibility for their own happiness and you are looking to improve the quality of your relationship with your parents this is a helpful tool towards that goal. Moving past the parent-child bond and into a richer more fullfilling relationship, dare I say friendship, can be difficult but if you're willing to be a grown up about it this book can assist you in tackling some of the issues you may be avoiding.

The authors personal anecdotes and related stories from her study subjects are helpful illustrations to which many of us can relate. It shows that even in the best of families we all have issues when it comes to dealing with our parents on an adult level. The chapters are concise and to the point without being cold and clinical.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple, solid and marriage saving, December 11, 2003

By	Sue "Founder, Sisters in Script" (Cedar Grove NJ United States) - See all my reviews

As a professional in the field, what I like about Nobody's Baby Now is that the author gets to the point quickly and in clear, concise language. The author makes complicated problems and issues with parents easy to sort out and resolve. Her real life examples make you think she's talking about you and your parents. She has solutions for adult children who resort to child-like behavior when with parents, who allow parents to continue to run their adult lives or parents who put a wedge in their adult children's marriages. She's got a solid handle on in-laws and tells readers how to get their own; and she totally understands overly involved, judgemental grandparents. Her main points are highlighted in boxed areas for quick reference which tell you how to get a "grip" on the issues you may have with a parent.

This is a book that can save marriages from parents' destructive behaviors and put adult children in charge of their own lives by making them independent of Mommy and Daddy without severing this powerful and all important connection. It is must reading for all adult children - be their problems with their parents big or small.