This little book is not focused on understanding your child. Instead, it is all about focusing on managing yourself as a parent. The ideas are based on research findings that reveal that the more a parent leans on 'experts' to tell them how to understand and influence their child the less confident they are about themselves as a parent leader. A well-intentioned focus on helping or fixing a child can easily lead to a confused and intense parent-child relationship where the child becomes reactive to their parent's monitoring. In this small book, Dr. Jenny Brown presents some big ideas about a different pathway to effective parenting. Based on her research and Dr. Murray Bowen's family systems theory she uses real examples to illustrate how parents recover their clarity and confidence, and in turn help their children to grow into responsibly resilient young people.

This book contains experts from Dr. Brown's best-selling book: Growing Yourself Up (Exilse Publishing) Further parenting resources: www.parentproject.com.au