Season 2, Episode 23 Mothering Difficult Adult Children

Today Ellen and Denise interviewed Judith Smith, the author of a new book called:  Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children through Conflict and Change.

Judith is a leader in gerontological research focusing on women’s experiences as they age. She is a senior clinical social worker, therapist, and professor at Fordham University. She lives in New York City.

Difficult focuses on adult children and takes the unique perspective of the mother.  I struggled reading this book and felt such compassion for these mothers and the sacrifices they made.

Judith wrote the book because she discovered that there was very little written about parenting adult children and in particular for these mothers who were saddled with very difficult situations.

Judith is writing about a particular set of mothers.  Mothers truly who have difficult adult children.

She talks about her hope that using the words, "difficult adult child" will help others understand and be supportive.  She says that 80 percent  of all children are being raised in a single family home and the person carrying most of the weight is the mother.  That is changing, but not by much. 


There are no magical answers but she pushed herself to think about this and offers some tools both on the episode and in the book. Here final hope is that this book will help these mothers not feel alone.

Some links: JASA. Book:  Torn in Two. Prochaska and DiClemte's Stages of Change Alanon.

Thanks so much to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer.
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