The Good Enough Teen: Raising Adolescents with Love and Acceptance (Despite How Impossible They Can Be)

by Brad E. Sachs

Book Overview

Respected psychologist Dr. Brad Sachs helps parents to recognize their unrealistic expectations for their teenagers and to love, accept and nurture the family they have to its full potential. His... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060587407
• ISBN13: 9780060587406
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

good practical help and advice

This book gives good practical help and advice in addition to general examples and exercises. Very enlightening.

ALL PARENTS OF TEENS SHOULD READ THIS

This is a fabulous book that I happened upon and could not put down. It should be titled, "What to expect from your teens and yes, it is normal". I found this book a fabulous tool with which to measure my teens progress against those of other teens without compairing them to the unrealistic expectations of many driven parents in our society and to take a step back and recognize the tremendous accomplishments that they make every day through good choices and responsible behaviors despite the occasional misstep. Teenagers are growing as rapidly as toddlers and this is a how to manual for all parents.

Good Enough For Me

The reviews state that if you read "one book about parenting, make it this one." High praise, but worth it. Without oversimplifying, or being overly reassuring, the author helps parents understand the conscious and subconscious narratives that they bring to parenthood, and enables them to see their children, and their interactions with their children, in a new light.The five-stage framework (Uncovering, Acknowledging, Understanding, Forgiving, Changing) is an accessible and thoughtful one, as are the chapters on marriage and divorce, and the ways in which our perceptions of our children are also filtered through our partner's lens.Highly readable, thought-provoking, realistic, and good-natured, THE GOOD ENOUGH CHILD was a wonderful book on a daunting topic.

How Did He Know?

How did Dr. Sachs know what goes on inside my head so much of the time while raising my two children? Continuing the thoughtful, good-natured, but telling approach of his first book, THINGS JUST HAVEN'T BEEN THE SAME: MAKING THE TRANSITION FROM MARRIAGE TO PARENTHOOD, the author follows parents along the developmental continuum, and helps us to adjust now that our children have gotten past infancy and toddlerhood.Taking on the most common, but vexing, parental dilemmas, Dr. Sachs guides the reader along a compassionate but firm childrearing path that, ultimately, asks us to look within ourselves and distinguish between "what we want for our children and what we want from our children."Eschewing a quickie, instant-gratification approach, readers are encouraged to examine the expectations that the bring both to their children and to themselves, and to bein to make a distinction between the realistic and unrealistic ones. The exercises at the end of each chapter are quite helpful in making the theoretical more practical, and the stories from his practice are truly inspirational: ordinary individuals taking extraordinary steps in the direction of true acceptance and love.This is certainly one of the five best parenting books I've ever read (I'd include his first one in the list!), and one that I can imagine re-reading several years down the road, just to get a refresher course.Get it and read it--you, and your children, will be grateful!

Excellent, insightful parenting guide.

Brad Sachs, Ph.D., is a family psychologist, founder and director of the Father Center and author of numerous articles and books. His website is .... His book is well-written and accessible with a very thorough index and table of contents. However, he does not provide a list of resources or recommended books, which can often be a useful addition to a book like this.I think the premiere concept in this book--it is completely brilliant and for itself alone is worth the price of admission--is the section on forgiving. In it, the author states, "In a balanced partnership between two people, there will be an ebb and flow between giving and getting that evens out over time and creates a sense of relationship balance." He labels this the "process of constructive entitlement," a normal and healthy expectation in relationships that when you give you get something back. Unfortunately, our search for relationship balance can become destructive when we unconsciously insist our children "redress imbalances that =did not= originate with them and may not even have anything to do with them." The author lists multiple categories of unspoken, unconscious expectations parents frequently have which can prevent us from seeing out child as "good enough." These include the following: (1) Having a child as a kind of "offering" to our own parents, "as if the child were a gift or repayment on a loan." Love and respect for the grandparents is forced on our child, rather than allowing it to happen naturally. Because this rarely works, it can cause pain to all involved. (2) Having a child to replace someone very close to us who died, including another child of our own or a close family member. Since "no person can every truly replace another," this dumps an enormous burden on the replacement child, often leaving him/her feeling inadequate and unloved for the very one he or she is. (3) Having a child as a way of reliving a wonderful childhood or vicariously experiencing through our child the wonderful childhood we did not have. Unfortunately, giving our child what we had or wished we could have had may not be well received by our child. His/her personality may be very different from ours, and our "meat" may be his/her "poison." (4) Having a child to make up for our past failures. Sadly, in this case, the child is often expected to live up to a far higher standard than the parent ever managed, including in the present, and the talents and desires of the child are ignored or scorned in favor of the parent's agenda. (5) Having a child to heal a failing marriage. Too often the reality of the intense demands of parenting puts the final nail in the coffin of a weak marriage rather than healing it. (6) Having a child to purify or decontaminate ourselves. Whatever part of us we have hated and disowned, including our very human need to be loved and nurtured--which makes us frighteningly vulnerable--we often hate and disown in our child. Once we figure out what category we fall into (m