Product Description

End Those Power Struggles and Begin Connecting with Your Child

Noted family educator Mary Sheedy Kurcinka struck a national chord with her bestselling Raising Your Spirited Child. Now she hits upon another crucial parenting topic: coping with the everyday challenges of disciplining your child, while understanding the issues behind his or her behavior. In Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles, she offers unique approaches to solving the daily, and often draining, power struggles between you and your child. Kurcinka views these conflicts as rich opportunities to teach your child essential life skills, like how to deal with strong emotions and problem solve. With her successful strategies, you'll be able to identify the trigger situations that set off these struggles and get to the root of the emotions and needs of you and your child.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4697 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Released on: 2001-02-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
Kids, parents, and power struggles--the inseparable triad of family life. What if you could avoid Machiavellian peacekeeping maneuverings and instead turn difficult situations with your child into jumping-off points to having a better and more productive relationship? Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's new book gives a concise, practical, and often humorous account of how to achieve this turnaround. Kurcinka doesn't promise miracle cures or overnight success, but by building on Daniel Goleman's groundbreaking work in Emotional Intelligence, she offers creative techniques for using power struggles as pathways to better understanding within any family. Drawing on her clinical experience with numerous real-life families, Kurcinka builds up an image of the parent as an "emotion coach," whose role is to build a strong, connected "team" by understanding the players' strengths and weaknesses and showing by instruction and example how best to play the game. The techniques she outlines are useful for children of any age--in fact, the younger, the better--and are based on firm guidelines and mutual respect. In sections such as "Bringing Down the Intensity," "Enforcing Your Standards," and "Teaching Life's Essential Skills," Kurcinka addresses the causes of power struggles rather than just the symptoms, so that families can reduce the pain of repeated conflict. By the end of the book, any parent should feel confident in applying the principles. --Katherine Ferguson

Review
"Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles is a helpful addition to the parenting literature and a delight to read. Kurcinka's vivid descriptions bring to light common conflicts, but her primary lesson is that power struggles give parents an opportunity to teach their children better ways of expressing frustration, anger, jealousy, and other emotions. Kurcinka also helps us recognize the role that temperament, both our own and out child's, plays in family life--and that continued success depends on respecting our differences."

-- Stella Chess, M.D., professor of child psychiatry, New York University Medical School, author of Goodness of Fit

"Mary Sheedy Kurcinka has written another excellent book for parents, this one about the seemingly inevitable power struggles between parents and their children. She provides wise, practical, and clear suggestions on how to avoid these conflicts and manage them better, chiefly by understanding the emotions that are fueling them. If only we all had this book a generation ago!" -- William B. Carey, M.D., director of behavioral pediatrics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, author of Understandng Your Child's Temperament

About the Author

Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, M.A., has more than twenty years of experience as an award-winning educator and is the bestselling author of Raising Your Spirited Child and Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles. She lives in Minnesota.

Customer Reviews

good addition to parenting repertoire
when i started reading this book, i found the author's advice to lack much parental backbone. however, as i kept reading i actually found that the author raised some excellent points. i learned more about myself and my child through her sections on personality assessment. most parenting books say "don't explain, just act/punish." i feel explaining has been helpful to our son and in the end will help him become a more emotionally intelligent human being. i would not have this book as the only parenting book on the shelf, but it makes a good companion to 1.2.3. Magic or books advocating that style of discipline.

Excellent, approachable book on working with your child's temperament
I bought three books at the same time from Amazon: Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles; How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk; and Kids Are Worth It! and read them in that order. Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles was my favorite because it really explained some key things for me. For example, I have a much better understanding of introverts and extroverts, which actually benefits my marriage most of all. I'm an extrovert who thinks while I talk, but my husband is an introvert who wants to be alone in a corner pondering how he feels. Because of this book, I'm able to give my husband the time he needs to figure out his emotions and I don't go crazy trying to get him to talk. Our daughter is an extrovert like me, so I know Daddy will need quiet time away from us noisy extroverts.

Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles covers so many things, including anger and how it affects us physiologically, understanding that there's a reason behind your child's tantrum or tears, determining your child's temperament, and teaching life skills in a constructive way. But most of all, this book does it in a way that doesn't make feel like I'm not a good enough parent or that this book's philosophy is the only way to view things. I will probably use most of the things this book teaches in my parenting, and I can't say that about the other two books I purchased at the same time.

To sum up this book, I would say that it's very approachable, the recommendations are helpful and doable immediately, and there are some very good examples to illustrate what the author is trying to teach us. If you're interested in learning about a parenting method that incorporates little or no spanking, includes quality time understanding your child's temperament and then teaching your child words to go with his/her feelings, and offers opportunities to problem-solve and negotiate *with* your child, this is an excellent book.

Great book
What I liked most about this book is that I felt like you could read one chapter, work on some things then read the next. I don't have time to sit down & read a whole book but a chapter or 2 per week works for me.

It really makes a lot of sense that your children have so many different emotions but don't know how to express them. I read this at the same time as siblings without rivalry and they really complemented each other.