How to Survive Your Parents: A Teen's Guide to Thriving in a Difficult Family

Ages 12 And Up, Grades 7 And Up

Want to improve your relationship with your problematic parents? This honest and supportive guide, written by an experienced teen therapist, will help.

This book is for you―not your parents. Step-by-step, using approaches that are relatively easy but bring big results, you’ll be guided in how to improve the important and super-challenging relationship between you and your parents. This doesn’t mean you’re going to become best friends, but you will learn the skills needed to change how you see one another and how you interact. And ultimately, you will gain control over your own life.

Included are revealing descriptions of various problematic parenting styles, techniques—both verbal and not—for increasing the connection between you and your parents, advice about setting clear boundaries, and sample conversations that can be used as a script. Think of it as therapy in book form: on your side, encouraging and clear, and full of the time-proven advice you won’t get from your friends and certainly not from your parents.

About the Author

Shawn Goodman has worked in the teen mental health field for many years and is currently a psychologist at a high school in upstate New York. He is the award-winning author of Kindness for Weakness and Something Like Hope, both of which were inspired by his experiences working in several New York State juvenile detention facilities. He is also the co-author of This Way Home, written with bestselling author and governor of Maryland Wes Moore. Shawn lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and children.

Author Residence: Ithaca, NY