Sarah M.

Great advice IF you decide to or must continue a relationship with someone with BPD

Revisado: 05-21-24

This book does offer some solid, straightforward advice for maintaining a relationship with a parent with BPD. It also helped me recognize some specific habits I have that are due to my experience being raised by a mother with BPD, such as explaining (and over explaining) how I use my time to others when it is really not necessary.

However, the book is not a good fit for people who are considering or already implementing no contact with their parent with BPD. Indeed, considering how to implement the advice in this book - which continues to have the adult child take care of their parent by working hard to create and maintain boundaries with parents who never learn - pushed me to the decision to go no contact. This book helped me realize that I am not interested in working so hard to have an unsatisfying relationship with a person who is so unlikely to change. If this is what must be done to have a relationship with someone with BPD, then I will opt out and continue to spend my life only with people who are capable of reciprocal love and respect. The only exception, of course, will be the children in my life, for whom it is developmentally normal to require one-sided care. I’ve put in my time and I’m not taking care of able adults anymore.

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Dish of parent guilt with a side of useful advice

Revisado: 07-27-22

Buckle up: This is a long review.

Usually when I rate something a 2 or 3 it indicates mediocrity. In this case, my rating indicates an average of my polarized feelings about this book. There are some useful strategies in this book. Her overall concept of controlling your own behavior, fostering an ongoing connection with your kid and coaching instead of controlling are all great ideas and are likely effective long term. However, her delivery and tone are just all wrong. She speaks in black-and-white terms, catastrophizes often and makes some suggestions that seem entirely out of touch with the vast majority of parents' situations. For instance, she gives an example of a dad who takes a YEAR off work to homeschool his son who has ADHD (while implementing things for him that likely add to the family's expenses). This is fantasy, rich folk nonsense.

Additionally, I feel that in some places she misrepresents the data on child rearing to provide more credibility for her ideas than they deserve. She discusses the "cookie study" for preschoolers and infers that their performance on this task predicts future life success and further that her parenting recommendations can create or hasten development of this executive function skill. I believe she is referring to the Marshmellow Experiment from 1972. This study is correlational and its conclusions are far from settled science. You can look it up and find plenty of criticisms of it and recent studies that simply refute its conclusions. She takes a hard stance against day care (as if all or most parents can simply stay home and not work for 4+ years for each child), sleep training and spacing siblings closer than about 4 years apart all without good evidence for any of these suggestions. If you are going to make a strong claim that something as necessary as child care for working families is dangerous for children's development, you really need to have some strong evidence of your claim. These ideas are really just her opinions, but they are presented as self-evident based on the literature.

But, my biggest complaint is really that her presentation of ideas to parents somehow fails to follow any of her own advice. Her tone conveyed parental blameworthiness and a sense that your transgressions have been so grave, and your children so fragile, that all has already been lost. I did not feel like this author was "partnering with me for success" the way she advised we do with our children. She really ratchets the guilt and shame up to 10 and I'm not sure why. You could easily present these ideas in a more flexible and optimistic way.

The irony is that the ideas in the book are roughly the way we already conduct ourselves with our kids. I am pretty familiar with research in social and developmental psychology and I think I internalized a lot of those messages before I even became a parent. I just never expected perfection from myself or crippling fragility from my kids so these ideas never seemed scary to me before reading this book. I picked up this book when my usually pleasant and easily manageable kids became clingy and defiant following the addition of a new sibling. I now feel like I just need to take some deep breaths, double my patience quotient and realize this too shall pass once we're all used to the new baby.

My advice: Read this book with a big grain of salt. Or, better yet, have a good friend without kids read it for you and relay the messages back to you in a not-so-condescending way to save yourself the frustration.

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Excellent!

Revisado: 07-02-21

Very well organized. Helpful financial wellness strategies that you can refer back to over time. I love Tiffany Aliche!

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More self-help than actionable financial advice

Revisado: 01-26-20

Few realistic actionable pieces of advice. This is really a motivational self-help book. I would appreciate his advice more if he stuck to investing advice and wealth accumulation. But he also opines on topics as distant from investing as proposing a solution to rising health care costs which is, of course, that everyone should just be rich so their can afford very expensive health care. He often sounded like my uninformed “arm chair politician” uncle ranting about the government and how lazy poor people are. But, he did inspire me to read more about investing and wealth management. So that’s a win.

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