In every family, parenting is filled with challenges as well as joys, and making the choice to become a parent means choosing both. But if you come from a troubled or dysfunctional family where you were emotionally or physically abused, you may wonder if you are really ready to parent children in a healthy way. The example set by your own parents taught you what you don't want for your children. How can you overcome this painful legacy and create what you do want: a stable, well-functioning home where your children feel safe, valued, and loved? The good news is that dysfunctional patterns and troubled lives do not have to be handed down to the next generation. Janet G. Woititz has counseled families for more than 20 years. Now, in Healthy Parenting, she draws upon her vast practical experience as a therapist, mother, and best-selling author to bring you the support and guidance you seek in creating a safe, nurturing environment for your children. Clear, direct, and practical, Healthy Parenting contrasts what happens in a healthy family with what happens in an unhealthy family, enabling you to identify the trouble spots in your own background and to overcome them in dealing with your own children. Effective parenting, Woititz contends, emerges from being able to recognize how your upbringing influences the way you raise your children, and knowing how to keep what works and discard what doesn't. Writing with clarity and compassion, she explores the vital challenges every parent faces - issues such as understanding boundaries, tolerating feelings, responding to a crisis, and learning to emphasize love rather than shame in teaching or disciplining a child. Throughout Healthy Parenting, frank and clarifying examples of common parenting dilemmas and triumphs bring these matters into brilliant focus. When adult children of troubled families learn what normal parenting is and what it is not, great burdens can be lifted, healing can take place, and loving, secure childr