Coping with Your Difficult Older Parent: A Guide For Stressed-Out Children »

Grace Lebow and Barbara Kane, the co-founders of Aging Network Services of Bethesda, Maryland, are clinical social workers and care managers, specializing in older people and their families. They created a nationwide network of similar professionals to work with geographically separated families. This is their first book.

Do You Have An Aging Parent Who —

• Blames you for everything that goes wrong?
• Cannot tolerate being alone, wants you all the time?
• Is obsessed with health problems, real, or imagined?
• Make unreasonable and/or irrational demands of you?
• Is hostile, negative and critical?

Coping with these traits in parents is an endless high-stress battle for their children. Though there's no medical defination for "difficult" parents, you know when you have one. While it's rare for adults to change their ways late in life, you can stop the vicious merry-go-round of anger, blame, guilt and frustration.

For the first time, here's a common-sense guide from professionals, with more than two decades in the field, on how to smooth communications with a challenging parent. Filled with practical tips for handling contentious behaviors and sample dialogues for some of the most troubling situations, this book addresses many hard issues, including: