Tired of Arguing With Your Kids: Wisdom from Parents Who Have Been There - Softcover

From 1987-1991, Curran worked as a Family Resource Consultant for Ireland, giving lectures around the country. She currently serves on the advisory boards of Practical Parenting Education and Family Information Services.

Known for speaking "parent language," Currans sense of humor and practical advice has attracted many readers to her work. Parents literally asked to read excerpts from Tired of Arguing with Your Kids? off her computer screen as she wrote. "Parents are hungry for these skills," Curran says.

Curran has applied those skills herself, raising three grown children. She and her husband, James, currently live in Littleton, Colorado.

I am also convinced that parents recognize the futility of most arguments with children but they don't know the right words to invoke to initiate change. That's what this book is all about. In the past several years, I have collected parents' effective responses to children's classic questions, complaints, charges, and arguments. I wish I could write that these are my own wise and original responses but most of them come from parents who have decided that family life isnt worth the ongoing argumentation that passes as communication in many American families.

We parents need to share our experiences and wisdom. I wish I had some of these creative responses 20 years ago when I was arguing with a five-year-old whether meatloaf was good or yucky. Back then, I argued. Today, Id simply agree, smile, and serve it. Older parents, parents whose children had grown up and left home, were my primary resources. They had learned to keep conflict in perspective. They had discovered that parents can ignore arguments without losing respect or control. And they were willing to share both their techniques and failures, bless them.

If I were reparenting these same three today, I would agree, ignore, and smile more -- and defend, explain, and mediate less. I would not play, as I once did, the presiding judge when they fought during play, asking patiently, 'Now, who started this? Then what happened? Who had the ball first? Why did you grab it? Did you say that to him? You know thats not permitted in this family.'

Eventually, as I matured in age and parenting, I learned to allow their conflicts to be their conflicts, recognizing their need to learn to get along without a parent referee. I simply asked them to go out of range of my hearing if they wanted to fight.

Our task is to learn to weed out the important arguments from the non-arguments. When we are able to do this, we can spend those precious units of energy on the really important feelings and issues of children. Non-arguments are those which are initiated by children to get parental attention, to alleviate boredom, to resist responsibility, and to contest parental authority. Non-arguments are those that are never settled and put away but rather are replayed daily as part of the family ritual. This book is devoted to dealing with these frustrating replays so we can preserve our energy to deal with issues which deserve our attention."