Easy to Love but Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Stories
...This remarkable book will land emotional punches to your heart and soul. Coeditors Kay Marner, a writer and blogger forADDitudeand writer Adrienne Ehlert Bashista collected essays by parents of kids who are neurologically diverse. These moms [and dads] have cried in their pillows, screamed our in frustration, failed, and succeeded.I know how difficult raising a child with ADHD and other challenges can be, but rarely have I read a book that acknowledged the day-to-day difficulties in a way that gripped me. I, too, have wrestled with these struggles. Parents of challenging children are frequently scorned and accused of being bad parents who escape their difficulties by feeding their children psychotropic medications to tame their behaviors. Interestingly, the majority of parents in this book waited years before accepting the suggestions of doctors to start medication.Give this book to family members, teachers, and others who don't understand the rigors of raising a child with disabilities, the ones who say that a good spanking and setting better limits willcurethe child of bad behaviors. The scales will drop from their eyes.-- --Terry Matlen, MSW, a psychotherapist and consultant specializing in adults with ADHD, ADDitude MagazineThere's no college course, no training, you're just dumped into the deep end with only instincts to guide you.Easy to Love, but Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Storiesis a discussion of parenting and the dread that many parents face as something goes wrong and being clueless on what to do. Parents share their stories with plenty of wisdom on how to overcome the pressures of being a parents, and how every child is different. "Easy to Love, but Hard to Raise" is a fine assortment of wisdom that any parent should embrace. --Terry Matlen, MSW, a psychotherapist and consultant specializing in adults with ADHD, ADDitude MagazineThere's no college course, no training, you're just dumped into the deep end with only instincts to guide you. Easy to Love, but Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Stories is a discussion of parenting and the dread that many parents face as something goes wrong and being clueless on what to do. Parents share their stories with plenty of wisdom on how to overcome the pressures of being a parents, and how every child is different. "Easy to Love, but Hard to Raise" is a fine assortment of wisdom that any parent should embrace. --Midwest Book Review: Small Press BookwatchInEasy to Love but Hard to Raiseparents raising children with challenging and invisible mental and behavioral disabilities find an outlet to share their personal stories of overwhelming frustration as well as treasured moments of small triumph. While resources on invisible childhood disabilities are vast the collection of new studies, treatments, and discoveries continues to grow each year resources that focus on the parents who rear these children are harder to find. Told in first person by a collective of parents, these personal essays pinpoint the difficult experiences that are unique to parents of children who exist in a world of alphabet soup where a child can be labeled with a litany of confusing disorders that require treatments that are rarely uniform and straightforward. While the disabilities range from the well-known ADHD, Asperger s syndrome, and autism to the lesser-known diagnosis of sensory integration dysfunction, the focus of all these essays is on the experience of parenting these children, not on the disability itself. For this reason, the book functions effectively as a support network for parents. Divided into six chapters, the stories in this collection cover a diverse assortment of issues. Each narrative is perceptive and well written, pinpointing sensitive, often intangible issues that will ring true for other parents seeking solace and a sense of community. A number of the essays, for example, touch on the emotional challenge of reconciling the haphazard reality of raising a difficult child with the sentimental image of mothering as intuitive and natural. These parents lack the comfort of knowing that the inevitable challenges of parenting tantrums, disobedience, tears can be met with firm, tried, and true parenting methods. Coming to terms with a reality vastly different from the norm is a running theme throughout this book. Each chapter also features a Tell Us More Q & A section where an expert is interviewed and provides insight into the particulars of a parent s story. An authority on ADHD, for example, provides answers as to why children with the disorder tend to have trouble making friends. Short, to-the-point answers provide a much needed outside perspective that sheds light on the reasons behind behavior that appears befuddling. Also interspersed throughout each section is a first-person account by Eve a representative of Everyparent, whose short, pithy anecdotes are gleaned from real parents and are meant to serve as a unifying point of experience. Both these sections offer further nuance and depth to the collection... ... an essential addition to the library of any parent raising a child with special challenges and will serve as an instrumental point of reference for caregivers and experts alike. --Foreword