Jerome A. Price and Judith Margerum
Jerome Price and Judith Margerum have joined forces to bring together an essential model for helping parents to help themselves as parents. Therapists will find here a host of practical, easy-to-implement strategies for working with parents to reclaim their lives when their children's behavior is out of control. Each Right to Be the Grown-Up package comes with a "Facilitator's Guide" and 6 copies of the "Parent Handbook." The package is designed to be used in groups or when working alongside parents in a private therapy setting. (The authors also provide a series of parenting affirmations -- or lifelines -- on wallet-sized cards so that therapists can give them out to their clients.)
The Facilitator's Guide is laid out into 5 sessions: Getting Started; Reactivity; Information; Coalitions/Teamwork; and Making It Work. Step-by-step guidance is provided on how to lead parents gently but determinedly through a series of learning modules, each of which will clarify parenting goals, instill hope, provide tools, and "unfuzzy" the boundaries that have faded over time. Practical exercises and support materials are offered throughout.
The Parent Handbook follows the sequence of the guide and offers a slew of helpful homework assignments, definitions, and mottos designed to reinforce the information presented there and to bolster parent confidence even at the toughest of times. Additional Parent Handbooks and packets of "lifelines" may be ordered separately.
Developed by the Michigan Family Institute, this skills program has already met with great success through workshops and trainings based on it. Price and Margerum show what it looks like to move from theory to action when it comes to improving the lives of parents and their adolescent children.
Book reviews "I found THE RIGHT TO BE THE GROWN-UP very easy for parents of any educational level to understand and use, (as well as for facilitators to implement.) It's a common-sense program without any "psychobabble" to confuse, alienate or intimidate already frustrated parents. It's a desperately needed program for the many families struggling with out-of-control teenagers.
-- Sergeant Pete Kelly
Berkley Police Youth Officer, Berkley, MI"Therapists Price and Margerum have developed an outstanding parenting skills training program that is ideal for addressing the special problems that parents face with today's youths. I found myself wishing that this program had been available when my own children were struggling through their adolescence.
"Price and Margerum provide strategies and suggest coping skills, which can be utilized by parents from various cultures. I highly recommend this approach not only to wary parents of adolescents, but also to individual and family therapists who work with troubled teens and their families."
-- Frank M. Dattilio, Ph.D., ABPP
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
About the authors Jerome A. Price is the director and founder of the Michigan Family Institute, Inc. He is author of Power and Compassion ( 1996).
Judith Margerum is associate director of the Michigan Family Institute.
See also 
Price PDF-Bookflyer