Do you have a child who ignores you when you give directions, or argues with you like an attorney trying to change your mind, or refuses to talk to you other than with a few words or grunts? Do you sometimes feel that you and your children are more like adversaries than allies? If you do, then Ally Parenting: A Non-Adversarial Approach to Transform Conflict Into Cooperation is for you. Each of these challenges creates a painful wall between you and your child that can melt away with an Ally Parenting approach.

This Ally Parenting book is the synthesis of twenty-two years of teaching parents through private parenting consultations, classes, and speaking engagements. Each chapter is an answer to questions parents have asked about how to get more cooperation from their children, or how to make them more responsible, or how to get their child to talk to them more. Parents who had tried many common strategies such as taking things away, isolating, yelling, pleading, threatening, shaming, questioning, and commanding, couldn’t stand it anymore.

These common authoritarian strategies create an adversarial relationship in the family. Therefore, parents are unable to influence their children and often feel like powerless victims. They want their children to view them as an ally who will listen to them and discuss problems with them. At the same time, they want to be respected as the final authority in the family. The parents in this book weren’t ready to give up on their families, so they reached out to me to find an alternate parenting approach that would work with their children.

As parents and I worked together, it became clear that they needed to know exactly what to say. Since they didn’t experience respectful parenting as a child, they didn’t have a reservoir of words to use. They needed to know what current words and actions were building the walls so they could stop using them. Parents also needed to know not only what to say, but how to listen so they could emotionally connect with their children. As a result, Ally Parenting was born.