Reviews

How’s Your Family Really Doing? is a guidebook that helps readers build strong, loving, and happy families for the new millennium.

Excellent, informative, helpful, and well written. As a psychologist who has seen many children and families in therapy, I was delighted to read How’s Your Family Really Doing? It is a wonderful resource that reflects the insights of two skilled and experienced family clinicians.

The book includes not only practical, realistic ideas for enriching one’s family life, but also a 50-point self-assessment instrument to examine one’s family’s strengths and the areas that require improvement. It is written in a reader-friendly manner that will be read and re-read by families and professionals alike. Don and Debra are to be commended for their impressive book.

-Robert Brooks, Ph.D., Psychologist, Faculty of Harvard Medical School
Co-author of Raising Resilient Children, and Co-author of The Power of Resilience

 

How’s Your Family Really Doing? offers a simple yet comprehensive way that anyone can evaluate their own family to identify both strengths and areas for improvement. It is an ingenious and original idea immediately accessible to parents and professionals alike, and the first like it that I have seen either in practice or in the literature.

This important new reference provides an opportunity, “all under one roof,” to be able to learn in more depth whatever you assess that your family needs. How’s Your Family Really Doing? takes the confusion out of our efforts to bring out the best in our families, showing how it is possible to construct a foundation o healthy habits, attitudes and behaviors for more loving and effective relationships.

-Ron Taffel, Ph.D., Psychologist
Author of Childhood Unbound and Breaking Through to Teens

 

The 10 Keys provided in How’s Your Family Really Doing? will ensure the answer is,“Getting better all the time.” These keys, such as Seeing the Positive, Balancing Closeness and Difference, Making Decisions, and Parenting Together, contain subtle insights that will appeal to even the most thoughtful and conscientious parents. Every key is backed up by very specific, practical steps just about everyone can realistically take. A brief quiz at the outset also helps parents identify their priority areas, so if you don’t want to read the entire book, you can focus on what is most important to you right now. 

 Don and Debra have harnessed their extensive clinical experience, their parenting wisdom, and what is obviously a strong sense of family to create a resource that will be of lasting value to parents, prospective parents, grandparents, and clinicians. It is welcoming, warm, and wise.

-Maurice J. Elias, Ph.D.
Author, Emotionally Intelligent Parenting and 
Director of Clinical Training, Rutgers University

 

Congratulations on an excellent book. The family is one of the mysteries of life—usually we can’t live without them and, at times, we can’t live with them. How’s Your Family Really Doing? is truly a guide to the perplexed. Read it and you and your family will certainly grow together.

-Charles Fishman, M.D.
Co-Author, Structural Family Therapy Techniques (with Salvadore Minuchin)
Author, Intensive Structural Therapy and Treating Troubled Adolescents

 

I loved it. I think your book will make an important contribution to the world of self-help family-focused books. Everyone knows that the family is a unit but most parenting books don’t treat it as such. Finally, here is a book that will really make a difference in your life because of its focus on the family. 

Dr. Jordan Paul, co-author, Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By You? and author of Becoming Your Own Hero.

-Dr. Jordan Paul, co-author, Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By You? and author of Becoming Your Own Hero.