Relief for Hurting Parents: How to Fight for the Lives of Teenagers:

This book has been so helpful. My wife and I have looked long and hard for something as appropriate as this book to help us through a powerful substance abuse problem with our (now) 17 year old son. He is just completing almost 7 months in the best residential treatment facility in our state, has had several hospitalizations both voluntary and involuntary as well as a stretch in a group home because of his wild and dangerous behaviors. During all these months my wife and I have been reading a lot of books, seen the best therapist we could find for ourselves, had intensive counseling sessions with staff at all the facilities he has been committed to including four good psychiatrists. But during all that time this book hits home more specifically to the patterns we have been through and is better even than the book recommended to us by the latest psychiatrist in our son's treatment facility. It reinforces everything we have learned to improve our parenting and we wish we had found this book years ago. I recommend this book for parents of any difficult or troubled kid, and I am buying extra copies to give to both our family therapist and and to our son's staff psychiatrist.

Unlike most self help parenting books, this book provides concrete and paractical examples from real case histories and further offers very easily applied strategies to help empower parents who feel helpless and are in pain. This book gives parents tools that work to improve the apparently impossible situations they find themselves in with their teenagers in trouble. It shares a tremendous pattern of commonality between many troubled adolescents. It shares and guides in a homey and friendly way in a time when parents feel so alone and guilty, humiliated and hurt, blindsided or incompetent. The title of the book doesn't even mention adolescents but that is exactly the age it helps with the most.

By: Buddy Scott