Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family - Softcover

McGraw, Dr. Phil

 
9780743273770: Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family
Softcover
ISBN 10: 074327377X ISBN 13: 9780743273770
Verlag: Free Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Do you feel that your family is not what it used to be, or what it has the potential to be? Do you worry that the parenting decisions you're making today may be scarring your child for life? Do you sometimes feel you are in a tug-of-war with the world over who will shape your child's values and beliefs?

With Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family, Dr. Phil offers a new classic on family life—and gives parents real answers and a plan for being the most positive and effective parents possible. Starting right now, you can begin to make realistic choices and take day-to-day actions that can make your family phenomenal. You must decide that you will lead your family with strength and love and that peace and joy are not just for the people next door or on TV. They're for your family.

In Family First, Dr. Phil gives it to parents straight: even in this fast-paced world your family should be the center of your life and your child's life. Parenting is the most important and noble act you will ever undertake, yet American families are threatened like never before from the inside as well as the outside—many of us fight too much, don't get involved enough in our children's lives, or get bogged down in life's daily struggles instead of keeping our eye on the big picture of our family's well-being.

Dr. Phil has been working with families for over twenty-five years to help them repair the fissures that have fractured their home lives. In Family First, he provides a proven action plan to help parents determine the strengths and weaknesses of their parenting style. His seven tools for purposeful parenting cover the most important elements for any parent: parenting for success—for the purpose of raising cooperative, caring, and competent children. Exercises, scripts, assessments, solutions for specific problems, and precise directions for implementing the steps you need to take are all included in this landmark work.

Dr. Phil shows parents how to make changes now—how to put a stop to your children's tantrums; talk to them about peer pressure or self-esteem; instill values like integrity, honesty, and respect for other people; and bring order back to your house. If you want your child to have a happy, fulfilled life, you must open your eyes to the crucial role you play in his or her development.

Most importantly, Dr. Phil's new book offers you and your family hope—for a phenomenal home life now, and a productive, fulfilling future for your children. As Dr. Phil says, you are not just raising children, you are also raising adults, and everything you do today impacts what kind of adult your child will become. You are building the future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Phil (Phillip C. McGraw, PhD) is the author of ten New York Times bestsellers. For twenty-one seasons, he hosted the award-winning talk show Dr. Phil, one of the most successful daytime programs in television history. He currently hosts Dr. Phil Primetime, on his own cable network, Merit Street Media, providing essential news and entertainment. McGraw resides in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Robin. They have two adult sons and four grandchildren.

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Chapter 1: Family Matters

What's wrong with the world...

People livin' like they ain't got no mamas.

-- THE BLACK EYED PEAS

He lives in two worlds, this twelve-year-old boy. Every day, he troops in and out of those two worlds, in and out of the tiny paint-peeled tract house he lives in with his father, mother and three sisters. To say his is a modest neighborhood is kind. To the casual observer the houses are indistinguishable. There is kind of a peace and order to the cookie-cutter sameness, everything in its place and a place for everything. At least so it appears. Like every other neighborhood in America, suburbia or the inner city, every home is a façade, an outward face that betrays little of what lies inside. Sometimes what is inside is the opposite of peaceful. Behind the social masks, all too often lie families that are chaotic and disconnected, that threaten to disintegrate with the next crisis. The boy lives in just such a house and in just such an American family.

Outside the doors of his home, the boy finds a world that seems immeasurably more validating. He has a small group of friends and acquaintances to whom he in some ways feels closer than his own family. Yet they too seem distant and different because he is different, at least in his own eyes. Among them, he, like so many others, wears a social mask of "okayness," but he doesn't know theirs is a mask as well. He seems relaxed, even confident, but secretly he's always on guard, because he knows he's not like them, not really. He knows he and his family are poor and that they live differently with different problems, problems you just don't talk about. He's making one of the first and most common mistakes children make: He's comparing his private reality, his world behind the door, to the social mask of all of his friends. He assumes that what he sees is the truth, and in comparison, his image of his own family situation suffers dismally.

In the world beyond his home, the discovery of athletics has been an absolute godsend. He and his family don't have the money, the clothes or the ability to participate in any of the extracurricular activities except for sports, which are free to all students. In fact, at his young age, the boy already works two jobs, and so he embraces sports as a leveling device. On the playing field, he doesn't have to talk or be like everybody else; he doesn't have to have money or a fancy upbringing or even a stable home. He just has to be what he is -- a strong and coordinated kid, able to excel at just about any sport. Through athletics, he has found not only his self-esteem but an acceptable outlet for a burning anger that he doesn't understand, but knows is always there. Even with sports as an outlet, violence and fights are an everyday occurrence in a rough testosterone-driven world. Backing down is not an option. Because of sports, the urge to win has been planted in his head like a fast-growing seed -- he loves being in the thick of competition and he has learned what it takes to win and others are eager to follow. The seed has sprouted; he doesn't like being second-best.

School life is less comfortable. He is smart, though not academically motivated. He reads all of his textbooks from cover to cover the first few weeks of school and masters the material, but could care less about class or grades. Homework is turned in only if it is handy to do so. Teachers find him quietly charming but reluctant to get involved. His writing is excellent when he bothers to do it. His test average is A+.

To his twelve-year-old sensibilities, being out with his buddies, playing sports with a passion and getting through each day are what life is all about -- "out there," at least, in "that world." Out there, in that world, he is his own person, but always with an undertow from the other world, the world behind the door.

Once he goes home, he enters a completely different world, and he becomes a completely different person.

Cut off from his friends, his athletics and his school life, he is withdrawn, sullen, depressed, lethargic and emotionally detached from the rest of his family. Being the only boy, he has his own small room and he stays in it the vast majority of his time. He has no television, not even a radio. He just stays quietly to himself and even comes and goes through his bedroom window to avoid walking through the house. Unbeknownst to his parents he roams the streets after the family is asleep. He sleeps little as his paper route starts at 4:30 a.m. Days and nights don't seem much different when you are alone. He yearns for the hours to pass so he can make his way out into the other world, the one in which he is more functional, engaging, successful and motivated, at least in some areas of life. There is an astonishing contrast between what he is like in that world, out there, and what he is like in this world, in here.

But why?

Before that question is answered, let me tell you that in the many years that I've worked with the parents of troubled youngsters like this one, it became quite common to hear a mother or father request that their "problem" child be fixed. "Get our child straight!" they would demand. "We just don't know what happened! He just seemed to go downhill overnight. He is so withdrawn, so down and depressed. What is wrong with him? Can't you do something to fix this problem?"

Is this right thinking? Not even almost. No matter what maladaptive behaviors a child is exhibiting, I can guarantee you that the problem is almost certainly with the entire family, and most often the child is just the sacrificial lamb dragged to the altar of the counselor because he or she happens to be making the most noise and has the least amount of power or ability to shift the focus to someone else.

Trying to understand a child's behavior without interviewing the rest of the family just won't cut it, and any therapist worth their salt knows it. I want to be sure you know it too. So let's step through the front door with the twelve-year-old boy I described earlier and observe the other five parts that would be missed if a therapist, or more importantly, you, as a defensive parent, trivialized or ignored the family aspect.

Life "in there," life with his family unit, is tumultuous, volatile and unpredictable. Here's the real cause for this boy's refusal to plug into his family: His father is a severe and chronic alcoholic. He is typically emotionally unavailable to the boy, and to the rest of the family. He and the boy have clashed violently when the alcohol takes over and while the father barely remembers the confrontations, the experiences are seared into the boy's mind and heart. Further, the father has aborted his career in sales, uprooted the family, moved to a new state and returned to school at a university in the hope of a brighter yet highly speculative future. Though nobly inspired, this decision hurtled this family of six into grinding poverty. There is little inner connection as each family member's own personal struggles drain them of energy. Hunger gnaws at times and doing without is just how it is. Life is insecure, as the children are the poor "new" kids. Life is emotionally barren, full of desperation and drama, with one crisis after another. Tired and struggling, this family is not coping well at all.

dClearly scarred by the psychological and emotional stress, the boy's two older sisters try in their own way to escape the turmoil. But this turns out to be a classic case of "out of the frying pan into the fire." Both sisters have ill-fated elopements with boyfriends before finishing high school. Tension is everywhere in the home. The boy loves his sisters and they have protected him and helped him in a number of ways, but then they were gone. When they returned home, they were strangely different. They weren't just...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
074327377X
ISBN 13 
9780743273770
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
303
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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