About the Book

Current and comprehensive, How’s Your Family Really Doing? is a guidebook that helps readers build strong, loving, and happy families for the new millennium. Weaving together contributions from psychology, systems theory and spirituality, it draws from extensive new research to highlight ten essential keys that define successful families. After completing a fifty-point questionnaire, parents receive feedback about their family’s strengths and areas for improvement. Providing practical tools for families in any stage of the life cycle, it is concise, engaging, and designed to capture the interest of working moms and dads who are often too busy to pore through lengthier works.

Since most people haven't had courses in how to be a family, our primary way of relating to each other has been determined by the families in which we grew up. Although we obviously don't want to recreate any unhealthy patterns from the families of our childhood, we often find ourselves lacking positive models. Our parents did the best they could; yet they, too, had few alternatives to draw from and many suffered the emotional effects of their own upbringing. Even if they had searched for answers about family health and dysfunction from the most esteemed professionals of their day, good information on these issues was not readily available. Fortunately today that information exists.

Although self-help books on parenting are as popular as ever, almost all have a particular focus on "the problem child," on addressing a particular parenting challenge, or on one developmental passage such as infancy, toddlerhood or adolescence. There are books on the explosive child, the out-of-sync child, the shy child, the overly sensitive child, and books that address sleep problems, disciplinary issues, and moral development. Although potentially useful, we have seen parents become frustrated or feel hopeless when they try new techniques at home with few successes. That's because these books fail to include the bigger picture of what might be happening in the family that contributes to the symptoms of the "problem child." Without focus on the essential threads that sustain health in the family as a whole, trying to help one person
in isolation is often for naught.

Our goals with this book are to help you to:

  • Understand the characteristics of healthy families and ways to bring out the best in each other.
  • Identify the strengths and the areas for improvement for your family.
  • Facilitate conversations between you, your partner, your parents, and children about desired changes.
  • Create a working set of goals to focus your efforts at improvement.
  • Examine the similarities and differences between your family of origin and your current family.
  • Find specific ways to strengthen your skills in each of the ten areas using our "tips and tools," and/or other strategies and books listed under Self-Help Resources.
  • In short, become a happier, healthier, more loving family!
A number of resources are also available at our website: HowsYourFamily.com. Included are copies of the Family Assessments*, answers to frequently asked questions, tips and reminders for each of the 10 Keys, and a blog on current family topics.

For professionals such as teachers, therapists, pediatricians, and graduate students, we have established a special section on our website called Clinicians Corner. Included are guidelines for utilizing these materials with families. Please come and share your feedback, questions, and contributions.

* Available upon publication of the book (this summer)